Playing Together Amongst Ruins

Under the guise of growth and productivity, capitalism has instead left ruins in its wake. Whether it be the terrors of global warming, depletion of natural resources in the name of capital, increasing job insecurity, or individual physical and mental exhaustion, capitalist ruins surround us. Throughout this piece, I hope to illustrate what is meant by capitalist “ruins” by tracing a few ways these ruins came to be in the first place. While I do not aim to give a comprehensive history or analysis of capitalism, I do aim to focus primarily on the concept of alienation and the means by which we may be able to “de-alienate” ourselves and our environments in order to live in these ruins.

The process of alienation is a requirement for capitalist success. In the book The Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Tsing uses the term “alienation” to refer to when “things are torn from their life-worlds to become objects of exchange.” This is intimately related to Tsing’s concept of salvage accumulation, that is, “the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced” (1). In other words, salvage accumulation is the process of turning non-commodities into commodities, alienating them from their original habitats and therefore imbuing them with capital value. Under a Marxist interpretation, alienation functions to separate a worker from their humanity by simply reducing them to the particular skill necessary to produce the desired product. As the traditional proletariat jobs that the typical Marxist approach relies upon begin to decrease in contemporary society, one may reimagine the concept of alienation through the lens of homo economicus, the phenomenon that humans become entrepreneurs of themselves, living life as a series of cost-benefit-analyses in order to maximize one’s potential capital. In this sense, man is made into a machine and one’s value is dependent upon one’s productivity, not one’s innate human traits, feelings, and beliefs that prove unconducive to the capitalist model. Similarly, Tsing describes how the matsutake mushroom becomes alienated– that is, estranged from its natural, historical, and cultural roots– in order to be launched into a global supply chain (1). 

There are two main consequences of this capitalist project of alienation that I think are important to highlight, one being its dependency on divisions, and the second being the specific sense of temporality that capitalism relies upon. 

Capitalism is maintained and sustained by erasing and obscuring the connections and relationships that exist throughout our world. Capital value can only be accumulated and extracted within a hierarchical system. These hierarchies are premised upon competition, which is a logic that turns interconnected species into seemingly self-sufficient and isolated individuals. Therefore, to live in capitalist ruins is to work towards mending these fissures. Within this economic logic that relies upon alienation from oneself, one another, and one’s environments, relationship building becomes a means of resistance and survival. The importance of relationships is made clear when Tsing outlines the translation process matsutake undergoes from gift in the forest, to commodity in transit, and finally to a gift again once it reaches households and dinner plates (1). The matsutake, in a way, becomes “de-alienated” and returns to gifts rather than commodities– gifts that mediate and build connections for the sake of building connections rather than for capital gain. Amidst damaged forests and capital extraction, matsutake have risen from capitalist ruins because of relationships. 

In addition to relying on competition, the capitalist model is dependent upon a certain conception of time. Capitalist temporality is one that is always looking forward and focused on future goals and accomplishments in the name of productivity. Capitalism must constantly look towards new horizons and landscapes to extract new value. However, this particular sense of temporality, while made to be internalized and universalized, leaves very few as victors and excludes the masses. The linear, uphill narrative is always promised yet rarely attained, leaving landscapes depleted and humans (and nonhumans) exhausted in its ruins.  

If ruins are created by an unattainable, vertical sense of time, then focusing our efforts on horizontal temporalities can serve as a survival tactic. By horizontal time, I mean moments that exist as ends in themselves rather than means to an end– thoughts, feelings, and actions that exist for the sake of existing and not for the sake of potential value extraction or future investments. Through Tsing’s work, I am most drawn to ideas of play, curiosity, and pleasure as affective and sensorial tools to resist these narratives and live among ruins.  

Continual curiosity, indefinite play, and embodied pleasure all exist as ongoing, lateral movements through time with no sense of checking off a to do list and no race to an always-impossible finish line. To live in capitalist ruins is to stumble across and relish in pockets, or “patches,” as Tsing may describe them, of these affective and sensorial moments and to thrive off of this newfound “pleasure of noticing” (1). In order to begin the process of de-alienation, we must first recognize alienation within ourselves; that is, estrangement from our bodies, from nature, and from other people. Regaining and reclaiming these relationships means tapping into our sensorial selves, or as Tsing puts it, “Getting by without progress requires a good deal of feeling around with our hands” (1). This process of touching, hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting things with the intention of connecting amidst ruins simultaneously bridges relational gaps and exists in an anti-progress time. 

One must internalize and put into practice the understanding that life is sustained through relationships, thereby resisting the harmful capitalist narrative that humans can exist as independent individuals, and that life is an uphill battle to achieve this autonomy. This is a story that purposefully blurs the inherent interconnectedness that flows through, between, among, and all around every member of an environment in order to maintain the hierarchies that feed capitalism. Living in ruins leaves you vulnerable to surprises that should be cherished as gifts amidst a world of commodities. As Tsing states in the prologue of the book, “Humans cannot survive by stomping on all the others” (1). When survival becomes collaborative rather than competitive, and sensorial rather than mechanical, humans and nonhumans alike have a greater chance of thriving within these ruins.

1. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World : On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Photo by Oskar Kadak on Unsplash

Written by Safa Figal