Burning Down the House

“Capitalism just is environmental crisis,” said Douglas Spencer in a lecture he gave for the Loudreaders series, an alternative pedagogical platform run by WAI Think Tank. The title of his presentation, “Burning Down the House: On Design and Renaturalization in the Capitalocene,” referenced the classic Talking Heads song, which, in the words of band frontman David Byrne, is a metaphor “for destroying something safe that entrapped you.” Defining that “something” was the focus of Spencer’s presentation. Aligning himself with the British philosopher Ray Brassier, Spencer refuted post-humanist and new materialist arguments that human exceptionalism is inherently exclusionary or that (re)naturalization is the only way out of ecological breakdown. Even though such views are often taken to be politically progressive, Spencer argued that they actually reinforce capitalism’s long-standing project to disappear all traces of its massive infrastructure and the extractive labor needed to sustain it. For Spencer, projects such as the Apple Campus by Foster + Partners and Oceanix by Bjarke Ingels Group allege an almost unmediated relationship between the human and the natural; in this way, they merely update the 19th-century representational device of the picturesque, which already attempted to naturalize infrastructure and the free, and unfree, labor behind it. Meaningful change, Spencer claimed, is not the domain of design alone. “For design to play any meaningful part in challenging this state of affairs and its consequences,” he concluded, “this would mean shifting from its long-standing naturalization of the social to working with and for the socialization of nature. It would mean burning down its own house.”