Destruction

destruction

Dani Ploeger

At first sight, acts of material destruction often seem to take place outside the aura of newness that permeates the everyday and its representations in consumer culture. However, a closer look shows that, as a matter of fact, destructive processes are at the core of capitalist culture. Drawing from Marx, economist Joseph Schumpeter suggests that capitalist economies are driven by what he calls the ‘gale of creative destruction’. In order to generate new surplus value, the capitalist economic system requires a continuous process of destroying existing structures. This happens on a systemic level, as the continuous reshaping of economic orders, but also in immediate material confrontations of war, demolition, and wilful neglect. Demolishing old buildings and infrastructures is oftentimes promoted because it ‘creates jobs’ and the engineering of ‘planned obsolescence’ in commodities can be seen as the design of processes of auto-destruction.

In everyday life, the practices of destruction that constitute the ‘back end’ of liberal capitalism are covered up by an incessant stream of representations of the smooth, the shiny, and the new. The weapon trade fair may be the most radical manifestation of this dialectic. While the majority of commodities offered here are unambiguously conceived to enact material destruction, their modes
of representation as a rule exceed the visual languages of consumerism in terms of the prominence of clean and spotless, slick material surfaces.

Industrial destruction of unused, 'off-spec' products at Northeast Data Destruction, Mansfield, MA.

 

Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’ can be seen as part of a broader characteristic of capitalist expansionism. In A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore argue that capitalist enterprise is underpinned by a never-ending drive towards accessing ever cheaper resources in the form of nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. In the context of this process of endless cheapening, ‘creative destruction’ operates as a catalyst for the system’s incessant need for devaluation. As such, the destructive tendency that lies at the core of capitalist enterprise contributes to its character as essentially a ‘frontier technology’ that in its search for cheapness is in a very fundamental way irreconcilable with ambitions to establish a truly ecologically sustainable economic model.

There are also forms of destruction that exist beyond the logic of Schumpeter’s ‘gale of creative destruction’. destruction caused by natural, non-human phenomena may nowadays occur as an indirect result of extractivist economic activity and will often quickly be subsumed in a process of commodification where ecological disaster serves as a cue for the development of new products, as is the case in e.g.,
the export of Dutch engineering systems to counter
the threats of rising sea-levels in Jakarta, Indonesia. Nevertheless, these forms of destruction that are not directly anthropogenic also fall outside the sphere of human control and are posing fundamental systemic challenges. Climate-change induced natural destruction will drastically limit access to cheap resources on a global scale. At some point the final frontier in the ceaseless quest towards cheapness
will be reached.

In addition to destruction caused by natural,
non-human phenomena, there is also direct, human induced destruction that takes place outside—and in opposition to—the ‘gale of creative destruction’. Through acts of unmaking, the mechanisms of capitalist production and consumption may be sabotaged to promote interests beyond mere cheapening and surplus value optimization.