Salvage accumulation is a notion put forth by Anna Tsing (2015), in which she shows how capitalism takes advantage of value produced out of capitalist control. This could be read as an update of sorts to Marx's concept of primitive accumulation, which responds to mutations in the global capitalist system of the postcolonial era. Marx talks about the initial transformation from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of production through violent dispossession and land appropriation, processes at the core of numerous colonial projects. Theft of the common lands under “ruthless terrorism (Marx in Harvey pp.298)” incorporated soil into capital, making the soil into a medium through which capital starts to circulate.
This commodification of the land necessarily goes hand in hand with the exercise of violence, either as an act or threat whether it's legally executed by a state apparatus, or extralegally enforced by private executors. By observing at how capitalism continues to expand and appropriate value in the present,
Tsing takes into account the global reach and complexity of contemporary capitalism, recognizing that it doesn't always produce value from its own, controlled environments, but often salvages it from places beyond its direct control or influence.
In this sense, Tsing extends Marx's analysis by showing that capitalism, while still rooted in processes of dispossession and exploitation that Marx highlighted, has developed ways to extract value from non-capitalist and even non-human spheres. This offers a more nuanced understanding of how capitalism continues to sustain itself and expand, continuously finding new frontiers for accumulation.
The idea of frontier is useful here. Elizabeth Povinelli (2018) shows how the ideas of the horizon and the frontier, have been crucial in the development of liberalism in its imperial and colonial forms. These concepts have helped liberalism avoid acknowledging its own violences by creating a narrative that separates it from its history of terrorism and erasure.
The frontier refers to a spatial imaginary and a contested space between civilized and uncivilized natures and cultures. It represents the territorial boundaries where sovereign powers meet and where the sovereignty of civilization may be challenged or disrupted by other non-social imaginaries. The frontier is associated with the expansion of territorial rule, conquest, and the imposition of a specific political theology. The horizon as a spatial imaginary represents an open and shifting space that liberalism enters and moves with. The horizon is associated with the norms and ideals of liberalism, which are used to distinguish it from other forms of governance and relationality. It serves as a mechanism to bracket or disavow the violence and harm caused by liberalism, framing it as unintended, accidental, or exceptional.
Law, for instance, is one of the foundations of so called western democracies. Derrida argues, “Law is always an authorized force, a force that justifies itself or is justified in applying itself, even if this justification may be judged from elsewhere to be unjust or unjustifiable. Applicability, ‘enforceability,’ is not an exterior or secondary possibility that may or may not be added as a supplement to law (in Goldstein 2008).” Alyosha Goldstein brings to the fore the rationale behind the vote against the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by the United States government in 2007. He states: “In other words, to specify “indigenous rights” would contaminate the universal rights of humankind with a corrosive particularity; it would, in effect, cancel out universal rights by making rights claims on behalf of a specific group of people. In this regard, Hagen1 hyperbolically insists, “We strongly support the full participation of indigenous peoples in democratic decision-making processes, but cannot accept the notion of a sub-national group having a ‘veto’ power over the legislative process (pp 837-838)”.
For Anna Tsing, frontiers are “discovered” and appropriated by capitalism. These frontiers are edges of space and time, zones not yet mapped nor regulated (2005), projects in making geographical and temporal experience, wildness reaching backward and forward in time. Edges where the expansive nature of extraction comes into its own. Endless frontiers made possible by newer technologies. Such as the technofrontier which emerged after WWII, remade internationally into yet another colonizing from. For Truillot, frontiers have been shaped by processes of conquest, exploitation, and dispossession; they are sites of colonial encounters and the imposition of power dynamics, where indigenous populations have often been marginalized and subjected to violence and displacement (2003).
Nicholas Blomley (2003) concurs with the idea that physical violence, whether realized or implied, is capital to the legitimation, foundation, and operation of the western property regime. Certain spatializations have played a practical and ideological role at all these moments. Both property and space, he says, are reproduced through various enactments. While those enactments can be symbolic, they must also be acknowledged as practical, material, and corporeal.
Cheryl Harris makes sure we don’t forget that in regards of property rights, race and racial identity are paramount in building and perpetuating social hierarchies in a “society structured on racial caste (1993 pp 1713)”, where land dispossession and wealth accumulation work concurrently towards supporting the edifice of racial capitalism.
In order then, to bring land art into the conversation, it is important to recall that “land art is property. It needs property to be purchased for it to sit upon, and it’s one person’s vision realized. It’s their property (Asenap 2022).” The violent imposition and enforcement of property laws which sit at the core of the western project (Trouillot ibid), which allow for the commodification of land, have deep implications for the forms of expression that emerge from those spaces, including art.
Space is a social product, imbued with the ideologies and power relations of the society that produces it (Lefebvre 1991) -yes, we’ve heard this so many times, yet bears restating. The process of turning land into property, into a commodity that can be bought, sold, exploited, where presences can be “rightfully” excluded while legally enforced, where trespassing can trigger a summary execution with immunity to the executor, we are then not merely describing a physical transformation, -involves a particular conceptualization of the land in legal, social, and cultural terms.
Artistic practices, as products of the aforementioned spatial, social, and material conditions, necessarily reflect the capitalist logics that underpin the production and commodification of space and nature. They cannot escape the foundational violence and ongoing processes of dispossession and exploitation associated with these capitalist structures. Art and land, become media through which capital circulates, their value dictated by the same phantasmatic forces that drive commodification, assetization, and speculation.
Now, land art wasn’t “discovered” by artists from in industrialized nations, on which capital surplus plays a pivotal role in facilitating artistic and cultural production due to the concentration of wealth and resources that fuel not only the creation but also the consumption and valuation of art. Also where the financial prosperity goes hand-in-hand with a history violence and suppression. This of course, in stark contrast to white exceptionalism.
Indigenous engaging with the earth at scale can be seen in multiple places the world over: from the colossal interventions such as those in Teotihuacan, Nazca, or Cairo, to the more intimate Serpent Mound in Ohio or a plethora of spontaneous occurrences which are so ingrained in everyday life that they are seldomly considered to belong within the artistic realm. However the land art movement Western-centric perspective on the land and its manipulation, which was inextricably tied to a history of colonization, dispossession, and exploitation of Indigenous lands and cultures.
To summarize this extremely brief discussion on art wants to make the point that for white supremacy, the only valid art is art that reinforces its own discourse, the self-referential. As a not-so-funny aside, in the United States, major funding for artistic endeavors comes from the legacy of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and Nelson Rockefeller via the foundations these purported philanthropists established.
This then, foreshadows the aesthetics of acting upon the face of the earth at scale while large-scale mining operations, driven by capitalist interests and often controlled by multinational corporations answering to the capitalistic endeavors of profit generation, have altered the landscapes, irreversibly and forever while having historically exhibited an utter disregard for the rights and interests of local, often Indigenous communities in the areas where they operate. On my prospectus I quote Klinger, where she expresses for instance, that for communists, chinese nationalists, japanese imperialists, soviets, and nazis, “when it was about extraction and industrialization [from and of the mines of Bayan Obo], the question wasn't whether it should be done or not, but instead: by whom (Klinger 01:04:20).”
Both land art and mining are in fact forms of territorial manipulation that emerged out of a predominantly western, capitalist worldview, but has for a while been joined by China’s “capitalism with asian values2,” which privileges the extraction of profit -whether aesthetic and/or economic, over everything else, including life. In the case of land art, the separation between land as an individual possession rather than a communal resource is echoed in the separation between art and everyday life.
Let us then return to salvage accumulation, and the spaces where capitalism takes advantage of value produced outside of capitalist control. I discussed on the field statement that he origins of the internet can be traced back to pericapitalist initiatives, largely spearheaded by government-funded research and public institutions, that did not operate under the direct influence of capitalist profit motive3.
Despite this collective and public foundation, the internet quickly was to become a technological frontier, ripe for capitalist co-option. The transformation of the internet from a pericapitalist, public good into a vast, profit-driven digital market, and its metastasizing into platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017), surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), and chokepoint capitalism (Giblin and Doctorow 2022), to name a few, reflects capitalist interests seizing upon the value produced in non-capitalistic settings, colonized and commodified. The “digital frontier” is thus not only a space for purported technological innovation but also a battleground for economic and ideological control at the end of geography.
Cryptocurrencies represent a hyperrealization of money as they extend and abstract the concept of value far beyond its traditional manifestations. Jean Baudrillard defined hyperreality as the generation by models of a real without origin or reality (1994), and cryptocurrencies fit well within this framework.
In traditional monetary systems, value is tethered to physical commodities (like gold) or the economic output and stability of nation-states (in the case of the denominated fiat currencies). Cryptocurrencies, however, are completely digital and decentralized, with their value primarily derived from complex mathematical algorithms and the collective belief in their worth. This disconnection from physical commodities or tangible economic production amplifies the concept of money to its most abstract form.
Moreover, the hyperreal nature of cryptocurrencies is magnified by the speculative tendencies of the crypto market. The volatile price swings, largely driven by investor sentiment, Elon Musk’s tweets, and speculation, underline the extent to which cryptocurrencies have become more than just a medium of exchange. They have transformed into speculative assets themselves, where their perceived value can drastically deviate from any conventional measures of intrinsic value.
In this hyperreal state, cryptocurrencies represent an extreme form of the fetishism of commodities, where social relations are obscured by the focus on the value of the commodity. Cryptocurrencies take this concept to an extreme, existing almost entirely within the realm of perceived, speculative value, detached from physical manifestation or traditional valuations based on utility, labor, or material cost.
Geraldine Juárez reminds us that the idea behind everything becoming a token: your mental health history, racist monkey drawings, your house; follows the same logic of assetization, which is defined by Kean Birch and Fabián Muniesa as the process of transforming something -anything, into an asset that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream.
It is then critical to emphasize that as blockchain technologies simplify the assetization process and promote the creation of assets, they essentially detach resources from their practical utility in the real economy. This detachment aims to imbue them with value, although unstable, in a fictional economy that prioritizes spectacular future returns rather than the essential covering of genuine human needs such as housing, healthcare, pensions, wages, education, leisure, and social well-being. Right here, right now.
Life within precarity, or without the promise of stability (Tsing 2015), can definitely provide the grounds from where mental gymnastics might help us internalize these get-rich-quick schemes as valid life options, since all other avenues seem to be closed. In the end, all influencers on insta, flash their lambos and mansions -those who gambled their pensions on FTX don’t post anymore.
Works cited
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Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation. University of Michigan Press.
Blomley, N. (2003). Law, Property, and the Geography of Violence: The Frontier, the Survey, and the Grid. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 93(1), 121–141.
Giblin, R., & Doctorow, C. (2022). Chokepoint capitalism: How big tech and big content captured creative labor markets and how we’ll win them back. Beacon Press.
Goldstein, A. (2008). Where the Nation Takes Place: Proprietary Regimes, Antistatism, and U.S. Settler Colonialism. South Atlantic Quarterly, 107(4), 833–861.
Harris, C. I. (1993). Whiteness as property. Harvard Law Review, 106(8), 1707–1791.
Harvey, D. (2010). A companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso.
Juárez, G. (2022). This is financial advice. Paletten, 327–328. https://paletten.net/artiklar/this-is-financial-advice. https://paletten.net/artiklar/this-is-financial-advice
Klinger, J. (2018, February 21). Julie Klinger on Rare Earth Frontiers. China Global Colloquium, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULR2MeM6tFk
Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell.
Povinelli, E. A. (2018). Horizons and Frontiers, Late Liberal Territoriality, and Toxic Habitats—Journal #90. E-Flux. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/90/191186/horizons-and-frontiers-late-liberal-territoriality-and-toxic-habitats/
Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.
Trouillot, M.-R. (2003). North Atlantic Fictions: Global Transformations, 1492–1945. In M.-R.
Tsing, A. L. (2005). Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton University Press.
Tsing, A. L. (2015). The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power (First edition.). PublicAffairs.
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