The Demolition
The gate was held by a loose cable hanging from the wall of the neighboring building. The cable might be a former power line that once connected all buildings in the street until the chain got interrupted. I started to ask myself what happened, how did the building get lost. The place had the strange aura of a modern ruin that got outpaced by its future obsolescence.
Very insightful speculations as such yet all these ideas are missing the attempt to be historically substantiated within a global social theory. It felt as if the common knowledge of the so-called “Global North” did not offer the right concept to assemble all these different ideas. Zhao Tingyang’s tianxia-theory based on Dao principles that describe a utopian human understanding based on the fact of its total inclusion in the world are not enough appropriated by young Western thinkers to merge their idea in a common cause.
One night the landlord dreamed of the deceased father who told her that an ancient treasure would have been buried underneath the building. A short time after she had the dream she went to action. She evicted the tenants on the first floor, hired a company, and started digging through the cellar.
Although she found nothing her ambitions didn’t slow down. Quite the contrary. She consulted construction engineers, evacuated the building, and tore it down. Later—according to some version of the story—public agents and even members of the government got involved. However, the alleged treasure never got found and in the meantime, the construction law got amended and did not grant permission to re-erect the building. The house was gone.
In the light of the discourses about alternative future and post-capitalist societies, I realized that this story has a strong moral account. Not only for the allegory that the landlord’s creed made her lose what she had similar to unnecessary consumption and exploitation of the planet that is destroying the global environment and thus the resource of life on this planet.
The good moral of the story is rather that she was ready to give up her property. She did it for the wrong cause—no question about that. Yet she did it, she showed the ability to give up her comfort to make a change.
This quality rather relates to humanity than to capitalist thinking, and if it is still active in modern subjects we might be not only the problem but also the solution for the future.