This is the first of the excerpts from my forthcoming book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction that I'll be posting on the blog. This is the theoretical intermezzo that opens up Part II of the book (Lost Cities). In the previous chapter, I examined how state violence defeated the indigenous insurgencies that had for centuries kept the state at bay from the Gran Chaco, and had created an anti-state spatial void in the heart of South America. After briefly making reference to the aftermath of that historically-specific destruction by state power, this section explores the concept of "the destruction of space."
Abstraction’s modus operandis is devastation, destruction (even if such destruction heralds creation).
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space
The violent destruction of the void of the
Gran Chaco by the state marked the disruption not only of particular forms of
sociality free from state control but also of a terrain defined by physical
striations that had slowed down state mobility for centuries. Military
conquest, therefore, was followed by the smoothing out of forests and swamps,
carried out over several decades in order to build roads, railroads,
telegraph lines, bridges, towns, airfields, ports, agricultural fields and cattle ranches. The clearest sign that military victory had
been complete was that the labor of defeated multitudes armed with shovels,
axes, pickaxes and machetes was used to destroy older striations, change the
form of the terrain, and produce a territory under state control.
The destruction of space inaugurated in the
Gran Chaco in the late nineteenth century has continued unabated. The
technologies of destruction have nonetheless changed. At the turn of the
twenty-first century, waves of bulldozers are smoothing out the striations of
the last areas of thick forests and destroying the homes of whoever happened to
live there to make abstract space for agribusiness and capital-intensive cattle
ranching. The western edge of the Gran Chaco is going through one of the highest
deforestation rates in the world. In the borderlands of Paraguay and Bolivia in
the northern Chaco, a handful of highly mobile Ayoreo people still committed to
avoiding living under state power are the very last remnants of the multitudes
that once formed the war machine of the Chaco. They are no more than two
dozen men and women and are permanently on the move, evading the myriad actors and the bulldozers that are rapidly obliterating the once thick forests of the northern Chaco. Far
from being un-contacted, these people are fleeing.
As Lucas Bessire has analyzed in gripping ethnographic detail, Ayoreo
people who left the bush only a few years ago told him they thought those
bulldozers regularly haunting them were monsters of steel. These people know what the
bulldozers are: machines of spatial destruction. Bulldozers are the main machines for the destruction of space that capitalist globalization relies on. The Ayoreo people aptly call them, “the
attackers of the world” (Bessire 2011).
Hundreds of kilometers to the south on the
western edge of the Chaco in Argentina, bulldozers are also on the
move to create soybean fields to satisfy the booming global demand for soy; and these machines are destroying places inhabited not by nomadic Indians but by
the criollo people who had taken their place in the name of civilization. It
was the ordinary people I met in my fieldwork who first prompted me to think
about the destruction of space. A ese
lugar lo han destruido, “They have destroyed that place,” was a common
phrase I heard throughout the region in reference to places disrupted
both recently or in a distant past by powerful people alien to the region.
“The destruction of space” may sound like a
counter-intuitive concept. The idea that space can be “destroyed” challenges
the common sense, first articulated by Newton, that space is the absolute
extension upon which objects are located as points in a measurable matrix (see
Casey 2007). This is, in fact, the same common sense disturbed by the notion of
“the production of space,” which as Lefebvre noted, is often imagined as a
timeless substratum that “cannot be produced.” But the production of space is always
predicated on spatial destruction, and this intermezzo explores this
intersection.
In The
Production of Space, Lefebvre revolutionized critical theory by emphasizing that
space should be examined through the lens of production. He forced us to think
about space as the materially created conditions of all forms of sociality,
oppression, struggle, and emancipation. And he demonstrated that production is
not restricted to the making of objects but that it is a force that generates space. Yet space, Lefebvre emphasized, is a product unlike any other; it is the very condition for sociality: a product that pervades
society in its entirety. It is through space and its production that the contradictions,
tensions, and struggles that shape any social formation become tangible. This
is why Lefebvre viewed the production of space as a profoundly disruptive and tension-ridden process. Space, he wrote, is ruptured and unstable,
“devastated and devastating” as well as “utterly dislocated” (1991:97). This spatial destructiveness is
apparent under capitalism and its tendency to generalize abstract space.
Lefebvre emphasized that abstract space is inherently violent and destructive,
a “lethal” space that “destroys the historical conditions that gave rise to
it.” “The negativity that Hegelianism attributed to historical temporality
alone is in fact characteristic of abstract space” (1991:370).
The destructive nature of capitalism lies upon its universalizing
abstractions, the product of a state of generalized commodification that reduces sensuous bodies and spaces to available and quantifiable slots: things to be bought and sold and turned into a source of profit. “There is a violence intrinsic to abstraction,
and to abstraction’s practical (social) use,” Lefebvre insisted. This abstraction, he noted, passes for “an
absence” as if capitalist quantifying abstractions were separate from “concrete” objects.
“Nothing could be more false. For abstraction’s modus operandi is devastation,
destruction (even if that destruction may sometimes herald creation)” (Lefebvre
1991: 289, emphasis in original).
Lefebvre, in other words, was well aware that
the production of space is profoundly violent and destructive; but he stopped
short of examining the destruction of space as a concept in its own terms. In
this intermezzo, I examine the destruction of space by drawing on Lefebvre and
also by spatializing Marx’s emphasis that production is inseparable from
destruction. In The Communist Manifesto,
Marx and Engels famously wrote that capitalism’s fabulous productivity is founded
upon equally fabulous levels of destruction. Under bourgeois society, they
wrote, “all old-established national industries have been destroyed or are
daily being destroyed.” Further,
what capitalism produces is regularly obliterated in crises of over-production,
which lead to the “enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces.” And
whereas previous systems were based on the conservation of their modes of
production, they argued that capitalism is founded on a constant
revolutionizing of production. And this dynamism has a dissolving force,
through which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations” are “swept away” and “all that is solid melts
into air” (Marx and Engels 1992 [1848]:4-9).
In Grundrisse, Marx (1993 [1858])
elaborated on the theoretical foundations of this principle by arguing that
production requires the destruction of raw materials. In this cycle,
consumption and production are different moments of the same process that
begins anew with production.
The production of space under capitalism creates vast levels of spatial destruction. Production and destruction work in tandem permanently giving new forms to the terrain, revealing the terrain's material plasticity, changing its layout in this or another way, redefining the political regimes
under which these disruptions are organized and contested. These negative and positive
moments in the transformation of the form of the terrain are inseparable but not identical. The
same way that the production of space is not the same as the production of
ordinary commodities, the destruction of space is not simply the physical
obliteration of objects and spatial forms; it is, primarily, the shattering of
the conditions of sociality that define a particular constellations of human and living nodes in the terrain. And the main measure of spatial destruction is its impact on
human bodies as well as all forms of life. When Lefebvre wrote that space is
devastated and devastating he was
pointing to its effects on human bodies, not on “space” in the abstract. In
Appalachia and the Andes, mining corporations are destroying spaces not only
because they are obliterating rock formations but also because they
saturate local places and streams with rubble and poison that negatively affect people
and all living forms. A political understanding of the destruction of space cannot but
be founded on an affective view of space.
The rise of capitalism represented
in this regard not only a new mode of production of space —of an abstract space at the
service of commoditization and state power— but also a whole new mode of spatial destruction. The
capitalist destruction of space shatters or disrupts all obstacles to its striving
for profit maximization. The traces of this destruction are constitutive of all
existing terrains, and are more than apparent in the massive environmental
devastation unleashed all over the planet in the past century.
David Harvey is one of the leading authors
who has highlighted the spatially destructive nature of capitalist production,
through his emphasis on the impact of speed on distance (the famous, if
misleading, “annihilation of space by time”) and the disruption of spatial forms
created by “uneven geographic development.” And he rightly identifies an important
tension between stasis and motion in these disruptions, for while capital
strives for mobility “capital invested in the land cannot be moved without
being destroyed” (Harvey 2010:190). Yet
Harvey has consistently examined this process with a concept with peculiarly
bourgeois baggage: “creative destruction.”
Coined and popularized by Joseph Schumpeter (1950) during the New Deal, the idea of capitalism's "creative destruction" appropriates the negativity of Marx’s view of
capitalist destruction yet rephrases it as creative,
thereby depoliticizing it. Through a subtle yet decisive ideological
sleight of hand, destruction is redefined as innovative, positive, desirable: the unavoidable side-effect of the
thriving dynamism of capitalism. It is therefore not surprising that neoliberal
economists and apologists of corporate power are particularly fond of praising capitalism’s
“creative destruction,” for in this usage the positive element, creation,
subsumes and neutralizes its destructiveness.
The concept of the destruction of space
follows a different path, which acknowledges the affirmative outcomes of
destruction but does not subsume this negativity to a creative affirmation. I prefer
to conceptualize this process as destructive
production, for what defines
production in its capitalist-imperial form is what Ann Stoler (2008) calls the ruination of spaces, bodies, and social
relations and the creation of social suffering. This destruction is, indeed, as
David Harvey and Neil Smith emphasize, spatially uneven. And this spatial
destruction creates what Chris Hedges and others aptly call sacrifice zones: "areas
destroyed for quarterly profit." “We’re talking about environmentally destroyed,
communities destroyed, human beings destroyed, families destroyed.”
Capitalist destruction can only come across
as “creative,” in other words, among those who (like Schumpeter) are secluded
from the debris it generates, and are keen to erase it. “The truth of the
matter,” Marshall Berman (1982:99-100)
points out, “is that everything that bourgeois society builds is built to be
torn down” and that the bourgeoisie “would tear down the world if it paid.” And
he added, “Their secret —a
secret that they have managed to keep even from themselves— is that, behind
their facades, they are the most violently destructive ruling class in
history.” By the same token, the destruction of space under capitalism is the
most devastating ever created, as the rapidly shifting patterns of climate and
extreme weather we are currently witnessing make it clear.
The destruction of space involves very different levels of physical disruption, intensity, violence, and different forms of temporality and speed. The most dramatic and abrupt forms are certainly those produced by warfare, which can obliterate whole cities or regions amid devastating violence and loss of life in a matter of days or weeks. This is destruction as sheer negativity, in which the obliteration of a particular space is usually not geared (in the short-term) toward the production of a new place but is an end in itself as part of a military engagement. Eyal Weizman’s gripping analysis of the Israeli 2009 invasion of Gaza is the best account I know of this type of spatial destruction. In Gaza, the destruction of space by the Israeli military operated through unrelenting firepower and physical force that created vast fields of ruins and 1,400 corpses, most of them of unarmed civilians. Weizman highlights a notable fact: most people died crushed by the ruins of the buildings that fell upon them, which means that the built environment “was turned into the very things that killed” (2012:100). This case shows that the terrain is inseparable from the bodies that live in it and that the destruction of space, therefore, often also destroys human bodies.
Yet in being also the negative moment of the
capitalist production of space, the destruction of space operates today at an
everyday, unrelenting pace whose temporality and intensity are dictated by the
shifting pulsations of capitalist productivity. Unlike situations of warfare,
this is the spatial destruction whose negativity is geared toward the
production of commodities and places. Countless nodes in the global terrain are
obliterated on a daily basis either to obtain raw materials (mountain tops
blown away to extract minerals) or to create places where more commodities can
be produced (forests bulldozed to create soybean fields). This means that
spatial destruction increases amid waves of economic acceleration and operates
ideologically through the expansive logic of abstract space: that is, the idea
that the whole planet is a blank surface to
be exploited for profit regardless of
whoever lives there and of the qualitative nature of those places. The destruction
of space represented on the movie Avatar,
with the obliteration of Pandora's huge forests by an imperial mining operation aptly
represents what is the situation today all over planet Earth, and not simply in
the Global South. The movie also makes it clear that the capitalist destruction
of space “in times of peace” is also an eminently violent affair that demands
the forced removal of the bodies living there and opposing this destruction.
Yet another crucial dimension of spatial
destruction in the capitalist-imperial present is that destruction is not simply a side
effect of capitalist dynamism: “collateral damage” created on the sidelines.
Destruction itself is a massive source of profits: the explicit purpose of crucial sectors of the global machine. Naomi
Klein’s The Shock Doctrine (2007) shows with clarity that we live in an
era of disaster capitalism in which corporations are attracted to recently-destroyed
places like a magnet, for they see in the affective shock and social upheaval
created by destruction a “business opportunity.” It happened in Iraq amid the
rubble created by the 2003 invasion and it happened in Haiti amid the rubble
created by the 2010 earthquake: corporations moving in on fields of ruins to
profit from them as part of imperial looting operations that are not simply part of the
primitive accumulation Marx analyzed in Capital
but are constitutive of the capitalist global order.
But the destruction of space is not simply
the outcome of capitalist growth; it also accelerates, acquiring a different
dynamic, when capitalist production goes through its cyclical periods of crisis.
This is spatial destruction created by factories shutting down, jobs disappearing,
and people either moving away or living a more degraded existence. This
destruction may be gradual and leave behind ghost towns whose physical
infrastructure may be initially intact but that reveal over time a place that
has been socially devastated. These places are destroyed not because they are
physically shattered but because the relations of sociality that gave them life
have dissolved. In the huge urban slums where a quarter of humanity lives, the
erosion of space adopts a different pace, closer to spatial degradation than
destruction: what Stoler (2008) calls the ruination that makes millions of people
live in derelict, polluted, debilitating spaces.
What all these different processes of spatial
destruction share is the unraveling or erosion of social-spatial configurations
and the emergence of new spatial forms punctuated by unwanted material surplus.
And this surplus of debris is more often than not superimposed upon older waves
of disruption. Lefebvre reflected briefly on these palimpsests of ruins when he
wrote that ancient ruins such as Troy or Leptis Magna “enshrine the
superimposed spaces of the succession of cities that have occupied them.” He
added that “each new addition inherits and reorganizes what has gone before;
each period or stratum carries its own preconditions beyond their limits” (1991 [1974]:164). The presence of ruins in the
terrain, in other words, affects and conditions the spaces that come
next, which in turn reorganize the pre-existing debris that surrounds them.
The constituent force of ruins also means
that the point in analyzing the destruction of space is not simply to outline
the salience of devastation in the making of terrain, but also to explore the
positive spatial and affective reconfigurations that follow, as well as the
afterlife of the debris thus created. First, people affected by spatial
destruction usually begin to rebuild and to try to remake their lives
immediately thereafter. Rebecca Solnit (2009)
has examined how places that are devastated often generate remarkable forms of solidarity and creativity among survivors . Not for nothing, as I analyze at
the end of the book, ruins can become, as Mark Healey (2011:6) has argued, “an invitation to transformation”: the
possibility of building something better.
Yet in the chapters that follow I examine a
different afterlife of ruins: their capacity to affect the living spaces and
social configurations that surround them because of their ongoing presence and
form as ruins. The transformation of
the Chaco into a space under state sovereignty took place in a terrain that was
already strewn with debris from previous waves of spatial destruction. And the
largest and more noticeable were the ruins of Spanish cities destroyed by the
war machine. The destruction of space, in this regard, is certainly not
restricted to state-capitalist formations; it also defines the negativity of
anti-imperial insurgencies aimed at destroying the spaces under the control of
the state. At the foot of the Andes, the ruins created by the war machine
continue haunting the living, the state, and the Catholic Church centuries
after their destruction.
References
Berman, Marshall
1982.
All That is Solid Melts into Air: The
Experience of Modernity. New York: Penguin.
Bessire, Lucas
2011.
Apocalipctic Futures: The Violent Transformation of Moral Human Life among the
Ayoreo-Sppeaking People of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco. American Ethnologist. 38(4): 743-757.
Casey, Edward
1997.
The Fate of Place: A Philosophical
History. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Harvey, David
2010.
The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of
Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Healey, Mark
2011.
The Ruins of the New Argentina: Peronism
and the Remaking of San Juan After the 1944 Earthquake Durham: Duke
University Press.
Klein, Naomi
2007.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism. New York: Knoff.
Lefebvre, Henri
1991
[1974]. The Production of Space.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Marx, Karl
1950. Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York,: Harper.
Solnit, Rebecca
2008."Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination."Cultural Anthropology. 23:191- 219.
1977
[1867]. Capital: A Critique of Political
Economy Vol. I. New York: Vintage.
1993 [1858]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York:Penguin.
1993 [1858]. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. New York:Penguin.
Marx, Karl and Friedrich
Engels
1992
[1848]. The Communist Manifesto.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, Neil
1984.
Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and
the Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schumpeter, Joseph Alois1950. Capitalism, socialism, and democracy. New York,: Harper.
2009.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The
Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. New York: Penguin.
Stoler, Ann2008."Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination."Cultural Anthropology. 23:191- 219.
Weizman, Eyal
2012. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso.
2012. The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza.London: Verso.
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