Trigg, Dylan - The Aesthetics of Decay_ Nothingness, Nostalgia, And the Absence of Reason

ADVANCE

PRAISE

FOR

The Aesthetics of Decay “The Aesthetics of Decay challenges the common assumption that progress is rational. With analytical rigor and eloquence of argument, Dylan Trigg’s book takes the reader on a journey through metaphysics, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, ethics, theology, and music to suggest the opposite: that the modern ruin redefines progress by embodying decline. A remarkable display of erudition and creativity, and written in an engaging and accessible style, this book is an exceptional foray into intriguing subject matter.” Sally Macarthur, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of Western Sydney; Author of Feminist Aesthetics in Music

The Aesthetics of Decay

NEW STUDIES IN AESTHETICS

Robert Ginsberg, General Editor Victor Yelverton Haines & Jo Ellen Jacobs, Associate Editors

Vol. 37

PETER LANG New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

Dylan Trigg

The Aesthetics of Decay Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason

PETER LANG New York ! Washington, D.C./Baltimore ! Bern Frankfurt am Main ! Berlin ! Brussels ! Vienna ! Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trigg, Dylan. The aesthetics of decay: nothingness, nostalgia, and the absence of reason / Dylan Trigg, p. cm. — (New studies in aesthetics; vol. 37) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8204-8646-9 ISSN 0893-6005

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek. Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.

Cover image courtesy of Damian Watson The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2006 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

For Giya Kancheli Intensity is silent. Its image is not. (I love everything that dazzles me and then accentuates the darkness within me.) René Char, “Redness of the Dawnbreakers”

Everyone carries a room about inside him. Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

Contents List of Illustrations .............................................................................................. xi Acknowledgments ............................................................................................. xiii Preface..................................................................................................................xv Introduction ...................................................................................................... xxi

Part One: Memories Unbound ............................... 1 One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Eight

Tarrying with the Nothing .................................................... 3 Silence, Violence, and Nothingness....................................11 An Uncanny Memory..........................................................21 The Specter of Exile.............................................................35 Dark Night of the Soul........................................................45 An Impossible Nostalgia......................................................53 The Decline of Postmodernism? .........................................67 The Revolt of Reason ..........................................................79

Part Two: Succumbing to Dissolution ...............93 Nine Ten Eleven Twelve Thirteen Fourteen Fifteen Sixteen

A Short History of Decay ....................................................95 An Uncanny Place: Modern Ruins ...................................119 The Post-Industrial Sublime..............................................141 The Phenomenology of the Alleyway................................155 Aesthetic Revulsion: Staircases and Rust..........................165 Transgressing Place: Urban Exploration...........................179 Space and Center: Ruins as Home ...................................193 Memories in Ruin..............................................................223

Works Cited .....................................................................................................251 Index .................................................................................................................261

List of Illustrations 1. Eugène Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus,” 1827–1828 (copyright: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris) ....................................100 2. Salvator Rosa, “Democritus in Meditation,” 1650 (copyright: Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) ..................................................105 3. Joseph Gandy, “View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins,” 1798 (copyright: Sir John Soane’s Museum, London) ..................107 4. Caspar David Friedrich, “The Polar Sea,” 1823–1824 (copyright: Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin)...............................................108 5. Salvator Rosa, “Witches at their Incantations,” 1646 (copyright: The National Gallery, London) ...................................................................129 6. The Bethlehem Steel Mill, Lackawanna. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.......132 7. Boatyard. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.........................................................138 8. Theater of Marcellus, Rome. Courtesy of Andrew Wickham ....................145 9. Power Station. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle ................................................149 10. The West Pier, Brighton. Image by author ...............................................152 11. Mt. Loretto Girls’ School, New York. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle .........169 12. Steel Mill, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle ..............................174 13. The Bethlehem Steel Mill, Lackawanna. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.....197 14. The Bethlehem Steel Mill, Lackawanna. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.....212 15. Lime Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle .....................................................219 16. North Wales Asylum. Image by author .....................................................248

Acknowledgments The writing of this book took place in a variety of cities and locations. Departure lounges, hotel lobbies, deserts, cafés, and ruins implicitly feature in the background. I am indebted to these places. I am also indebted to numerous colleagues and friends who helped facilitate the development of the book. Along with sharing my passion for ruins, Professor Robert Ginsberg has been a rigorous editor, a supportive colleague, and a valued friend. With his editorial suggestions, the book was improved in innumerable ways. David Osmond-Smith gave inspiration and encouragement by his strength of thought. Conversations with Ken Gemes helped cultivate the kernels of this book. Sally Macarthur and Emma-Louise Jay were especially helpful in commenting on sections of the book as it was being written. At Peter Lang, New York, my thanks to Brittany Schwartz, Gabriel Miller, Sophie Appel, and Bernadette Shade for their production assistance. More broadly, I would like to thank the following friends, colleagues, and interlocutors who have assisted and supported the writing of this book in one way or another, principally: Bani Sethi, Alexander Ivashkin, Caitlin DeSilvey, Robert Lort, David Seamon, Ann Williams, Steve Mitchelmore, Rachel Gadsden, Bruce Janz, Jeff Chapman, Zuzana Karasova, Meredith Younger, Christopher Janaway, and Samuel Guttenplan. Elizabeth Olivia Walling’s patience, warmth, and love made the writing of this book a pleasure. I am, as ever, always grateful. Thank you to my family who have endured my fascination with decay no doubt for too long. My thanks to Shaun O’Boyle, Damian Watson, and Andrew Wickham for allowing me to reproduce their photographs. Acknowledgment is extended to the following publishers who have kindly given their permission to reprint the following passages from their works: (1). Paul Celan’s poem “Psalm,” translated by Michael Hamburger, Selected Poems by Paul Celan, Harmondsorth: Penguin, 1988. Reprinted with permission from Johnson & Alcock Ltd. (2). Charles Baudelaire’s poems “Correspondences,” “The Swan,” and “Une Charogne,” translated by James McGowan, The Flowers of Evil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. (3). René Char’s poems “Redness of the Dawnbreakers” and “On the Heights,” edited and translated by Michael Worton, The Dawnbreakers, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

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For permission to reproduce their following paintings, my sincere thanks to: (1). Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, for permission to use Salvator Rosa, “Democritus in Meditation,” 1650. (2). Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, for permission to use Joseph Gandy, “View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins,” 1798. (3). Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin, for permission to use Caspar David Friedrich, “The Polar Sea,” 1823–1824, Hamburger Kunsthalle. (4). Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, for permission to use Eugène Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus,” 1827–1828, Louvre. (5). The National Gallery, London for permission to use Salvator Rosa, “Witches at their Incantations,” 1646.

Preface The organization of this book reflects the argument which grounds it. The preparation for an account of modern ruins is established in the first half, before ruins themselves are examined in the second half. Since reason must precede space, the book necessarily entails a preparatory foundation. Thus, the work is centered around a discussion of the Nothing which entails firstly locating nothingness within an aesthetic environment, and secondly, reclaiming it through self-conscious intercession. From this method, the mode of consciousness with which the present age is identifiable is analyzed in a historical context. Accordingly, this work evolves from a discussion of metaphysics, moves into an analysis of memory, consciousness, and theology, before settling into an account of nostalgia, decay, and the absence of reason. Since the ensuing argument for the aesthetics of decay involves a discursion into fields not obviously related to the topic of ruins, (though simultaneously being inextricably bound to the overall thesis), an overview of the central argument will furnish the reader with a means of orientation. Because it is fundamental to the thesis of the book, Chapter One begins by introducing Heidegger’s idea of the Nothing. Through a reading of his lecture “What is Metaphysics?,” I critically question Heidegger’s logic, particularly the correlation between anxiety and nothingness. In doing so, I prepare the basis for a re-reading of the Nothing which situates it outside of consciousness, that is, in space. Thus, in Chapter Two, the abstractedness of nothingness finds an analogue in the experience of silence. As with the Nothing, if isolated from its preceding backdrop, silence is unrecognizable. In order for the Nothing to be experienced with greater force, it must arise from a context which violently disjoins with it. Through an analysis of the music of the contemporary Georgian composer Giya Kancheli, I clarify this thesis concerning the bond between violence and silence, concluding that mourning is a form of experiential silence. Nevertheless, so that silence can reclaimed by consciousness, a hermeneutic relationship between the aesthetic object and the subject engaging in that work must be set in place. The structure of the Nothing therefore means that it must be positioned outside, in the aesthetics of silence, before being withdrawn into consciousness. Chapter Three encloses silence in consciousness through identifying it as an aspect of memory. With reference to Henri Bergson, I argue that

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unmediated experience is undermined by the ubiquitous nature of memory, dormant or otherwise. As a result of this, locating the Nothing explicitly in the distinction between habit memories and involuntary memories is confounded by the multifaceted and opaque structure of consciousness. Examining the phenomenology of consciousness thus renders the analysis of silence complete. The task of Chapter Four affirms Bergson’s analysis of memory and thereby concedes to a hierarchical distinction between a linear, temporalcentered model of consciousness and a non-linear and non-mediated experience of consciousness. Since spontaneous memory is shattered by volition, an analytic of daydreaming confirms the “reality” of inaccessible memory. Nonetheless, because memory is untimely, the present emerges only as an anticipation of its own passing. With this passing, the present is realized as past. By lacking self-certainty, consciousness becomes ungrounded and in exile from temporal unity. Having characterized consciousness as being in exile, Chapter Five locates this dynamic in a broader context by contrasting it with the archetypal exile: the Christian Fall. Suggesting that we may be able to accost a resolution to the problem of exile through a rereading of the Fall, the argument is put forward that Christianity’s analysis of exile is partial, since it delimits exile by enforcing a redemptive guise upon it. What is required is an understanding of exile which posits the absence of God. In the absence of a definite reunification with the home, exile becomes intimately bound with nostalgia. Chapter Six proceeds to examine the logic of nostalgia. By criticizing Heidegger’s spatial-centrism, I put forward the impossibility of nostalgia as determined by a desire maintained by illusion. The essential vacuity of nostalgia guarantees its continuity. Unavailable, the object of nostalgia is impervious to the fall from history, and is thereby idealized from the vantage point of the present. The remainder of the chapter moves beyond individual nostalgia and examines the philosophy of history in general. Through a reading of history in Nietzsche and Hegel, I draw the conclusion that homecoming has framed the Enlightenment’s notion of the rational absolute. Since the drive is determined by absence, it entails regression. In the shadow of postmodernism, we assume that a fixed rational desire has been dislodged. The validity of this claim will be the topic of the subsequent chapter. Chapter Seven asks to what degree postmodernism has succeeded in undermining the claim to a rational ideal. Examining Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, I argue that the simple elimination of the “metanarrative” does not entail a simultaneous elimination of nostalgia. This is evident in that

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the identity of the little narrative (petit récit) depends on its lost “other” for its status. This constructive tendency presupposes an ideal reminiscent of the Enlightenment. The consolatory nature of postmodernism, revealed in its predilection for kitsch aesthetics and accentuated by a ruthless duplicity with regard to the past, testifies to its conceptual infirmity and cultural exhaustion. From a historical perspective, postmodernism emerges as a form of protracted mourning against the collapse of reason, rather than a consistent attempt to engage in a critique of reason. Establishing that Postmodernism forms the plaintive lament toward reason, the task of Chapter Eight is to trace the gradual decline of the Enlightenment’s rational project to the present. What follows is an account of the dialectic of reason as it moves from the formality of Kant to the passions of the Romantics before shifting into twentieth century revolt. The chapter concludes by analyzing the relationship between progress, decline, and reason. The task is set to position decline spatially, so as to create the possibility of progress without the foundation of an established past. This task is achieved through contemplation of the decaying object, being the outward expression of the narrative of decline. Chapter Nine marks the second half of the book and accordingly the theme of ruins, decay, and the Nothing becomes central. By aligning itself with the place of absence determined by the failure of reason, consciousness finds itself in the region of the Nothing. The twofold unfolding of the Nothing takes place externally in the ruin and internally through the silence of reason. To substantiate this position, the bulk of the chapter outlines a short history of decay which concludes with the contemporary manifestation of cultural pessimism. Chapter Ten is concerned with the bonds between cultural pessimism, capitalism, and the development of modern ruins. In particular, I analyze the logic between consumption and deserted spaces before situating the ruin in a phenomenological account of space and place. Modern ruins are distinct in that they are temporally proximate to the present age, yet simultaneously able to gather the remnants of time. In Chapter Eleven, the identity of the ruin is explored by contrasting ancient ruins with modern ones with the purpose of identifying a common bond. Suggesting that the main divergence between the ancient and the modern is, respectively, the distinction between the beautiful and the postindustrial sublime, after an overview of this division, I argue that for aesthetics to rise above detached spectatorship, an element of sublimity is a prerequisite. In the case of ruins, this means relying on the volatility of decay.

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Chapter Twelve and Chapter Thirteen confirm the previous argument by venturing toward a phenomenology of the alleyway and broken staircase respectively. In both cases, geometrical size does not disprove the possibility of aesthetic grandeur. Instead, the presence of decay implicates an aesthetic quality, which is as much bound with ontology as with visual splendor. In the case of the staircase, the archetypal relationship between ascent and knowledge is contested in the experience of the ruined staircase. Despite this, the desire to ascend remains intact, so reveals an overcoming of rationality, where rationality and progress is founded in the presupposition of ascent. Chapter Thirteen concludes by critically examining the work of artist Gustave Metzger. Chapter Fourteen analyzes the contemporary manifestation of decline in its everyday appearance. Urban exploration is the act of exploring urban ruins and inaccessible sites. Here, I question the implications of urban exploration in the context of spatial ordering. With reference to the work of Georges Bataille, I discuss the relationship between trespassing and transgressing. Because the future of urban exploration will rely more on transgression than it will aesthetics, it opens itself up to failure, so leaves the significance of the ruin undiscovered. Chapter Fifteen seeks to reclaim and confirm the ontological significance of the ruin. Arguing that the narrative of history necessitates a disjunction between temporal continuity and post-rational history, the task of this chapter is to explore the conditions under which home can be established in a homeless context. Through a consideration of postmodernist and modernist architecture, the rational home, hitherto the guarantor dwelling, is replaced with a dwelling characterized by a proximity to decline and the Nothing. Chapter Sixteen, the final chapter, puts forward an ethics of memory, which challenges the rational emphasis on the permanent emplacement of memory. In the place of decay, preservation and conservation are replaced by fragmentation and dissolution. By considering how monuments fall from historic significance and become kitsch artifacts, I put forward the view that ruins evade a static, and thus nostalgic, image of the past by rendering memory ambiguous. As the ethic of rational preservation is disputed, the chapter and the book conclude by advocating a model of critical memory. Broadly, the intention of this book is to establish a context in which the aesthetics of decay, rather than being confined to a category of simple subversion, employing “praxis” to legitimize itself, sees the ruin as complete in its fragmentation. If the fragmented quality of the ruin were restored to a totality, it would lose its status as a ruin and instead be reduced to a monument. In the continuity of its disbanding, the ruin rewards us with insight, and so

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creates a space in which the end of rationality converges. Thinking alongside the ruin means recognizing its ability to evaluate progress. At the same time, out of its disorder, a new order, vital and dynamic, emerges, suggesting new modes of dwelling: modes which obligate us to rethink how we deem “centrality.” Ultimately, I take an affirmative stance toward decay, which celebrates its fragmentedness and its ability to contest dogmatism. In saying this, the ruin does not redeem, nor restore moral failure; at best, it can only clarify what was already dormant. In the present book, the idea that reason is exhausted is dormant and, accordingly, decline is the means by which progress can be realized. The pleasure that aesthetics affords is located in its potential to recognize a reciprocal relationship between the subject and the environment in which that subject exists. This book does not set out to exhaust the bond between rationality and ruination. If it can alert the reader to the union between progress and decay, and memory and the fragmentation of place, then its aim will have been achieved.

Introduction Among Europeans today there is no lack of those who are entitled to call themselves homeless in a distinctive and honorable sense…for their fate is hard, their hopes are uncertain; it is quite a feat to devise some comfort for them—but to what avail? We children of the future, how could we be at home in this today? We feel disfavor for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home in this fragile, broken time of transition; as for ‘realities’ we do not believe they will last. The ice that still supports people today has become very thin; the wind that brings the thaw is blowing; we ourselves who are homeless constitute a force that breaks open ice and other all too thin realities. Nietzsche (1974, p. 338)

I To begin with, a question: considering the history of the twentieth century, a legacy of destruction which looks set to increase into the present century, can we still maintain that reason is the mechanism by which progress can be realized? On the surface, the answer is positive. Despite the West’s fall into cultural pessimism, the sovereignty of reason has apparently resisted exhaustion. If this claim is doubted in abstraction, then it is evident in the notion of a philosophical principle as static and absolute. Conflict invariably ensues when the principle, led by the claims of reason, exceeds its universality in relation to a temporal present, so becoming distinctly fetid. The divergence between universality and the temporal present is compounded as ideas are mistaken to be intuitive, humanistic, or otherwise innate: terms which justifiably warrant suspicion. In the absence of such suspicion, the familiarity of reason prevents it from disbanding. The implications are twofold. Disillusionment and dogma are the likely consequence as a society adjusts to the void between a static principle and the mutable world in which that principle exists. Secondly, in the face of destruction and ruin, a reconfiguration of the principle which resisted such forces would only concede to the sovereignty of the former principle. Instead of this retreat, the employment of reason gathers greater violence, until a dialectic is formed whereby anti-progress and reason become inextricably, if falsely, bound. Without a definite presence, the concept of reason becomes unclear. By way of substantiating this ambiguity, reason resorts to defining itself negatively. A lack of reason, led principally by “irrationalism,” generally, but imprecisely, suggests anti-intellectual emotionalism and vague intuitionism. The inclusion of emotion and intuition provide a clue to the foundation of

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what reason aspires toward. If intuition is reactionary, then being overly exposed to contextual circumstances, its judgment is said to be contingent. Reason, meanwhile, is said to derive from an atemporal and placeless (non)environment in which context is subjugated by necessity. Kant’s aesthetic formalism testifies to this lack of contextual content in its claim to disinterested delight. Through suppressing the particularity of context, aesthetic universality is acquired at the expense of actual experience. Similarly, rational progress is won as reactions and instincts, particular qualities, are suspended. Precisely what this progress entails remains an obscurity characterized by conceptual insecurity. Yet into this space of obscurity, a vague set of themes united by their commitment to the idea of permanency, be it political or philosophical, take precedence.

II The topic of this book is not the insidiousness of specific political and philosophical regimes. Commentaries on this, and even commentaries on those commentaries, are already in overabundance. This book is an attack on the notion of rational progress which underlies those regimes. My usage of the term “reason” is limited to the mode of rationality as a homogenizing agent which defines and identifies the particular in accordance with a static principle already established in the past. Such a use of reason does not entail an attack on methodological reason. So long as absolute reason lays claim to universality, then the presence of permanence is simultaneously implicated. Universality evades contingency and temporal mutability as it strives toward the absolute. Yet if this entails reason being a pernicious presence, then the conflict is accentuated, in that reason predominantly depends upon an image evoked in the already-lived past to construct an indeterminate present. The past as superior to the present is thus central to reason’s attraction and to the faith it tacitly attests in progressively returning to that past. In this book, I criticize the claim that reason is the guarantor of progress. As the notion of reason becomes ever vaguer, its (non)-presence undergoes doubt. That this unfolding is met with violent resistance is symptomatic of its centrality in romantic, modern, and consummately postmodern thought. As such, its presence persists. About this continuity, Paul Feyerabend speculates: “We may surmise that the idea is a leftover from times when important matters were run from a single center, a king, or a jealous god, supporting and giving authority to a single world view” (Feyerabend, 2002, p. 11). For Feyerabend, a benefit of reason is its lack of content, since, “it enables special groups to call themselves ‘rationalists,’ to claim that widely recognized

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successes were the work of Reason and to use the strength thus gained to suppress developments contrary to their interests” (Ibid.). Feyerabend’s comments correctly identify what is fundamental to reason: firstly, the mythological lineage, which implicitly testifies to a once unified perspective. Secondly, the supposed legitimacy reason confers upon thought and praxis. Thirdly, the absence reason creates in its fall from certainty. That the reality of the myth has now eroded does nothing to lessen the enthusiasm of “rationalists.” On the contrary, if reason is thought to be timeless, then its absence is not a matter of it being annihilated, but lost. The struggle for reason relies on the supposition that its strength can be rediscovered and so resurrected. Despite the persistence of reason, this book undertakes the task of reaffirming the decline of reason, so exploring the space deserted by this decline. My point of departure is that progress is compatible with the absence of reason and that the supposed antithesis of progress—decline—is the means by which a critique of progress is possible. How will this possibility be realized? Since reason, after Kant, has sought to be essentially placeless in its universality, depending, as it does, on formal rather than particular properties, placing reason in a spatial and temporal context will establish the conditions under which the ambiguity of reason gives way to the clarity of its absence. Through lived experience of the built environment, what is unconsciously implicit is rendered self-consciously explicit, as Siegfried Kracauer writes accurately, “The surface-level expression…by virtue of their unconscious nature provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the state of things. Conversely, knowledge of the state of things depends on the interpretation of these surface-level expressions” (Kracauer, 1995, p. 75). For Kracauer marginalized space, hotel lobbies and employment agencies for instance, becomes the platform through which ideas concerning the inversion of secular space are manifest. As a result of this manifestation, space becomes the extension of thought and so allows thought itself to be objectified, as he writes in a celebrated passage: “Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself” (cited in Leach, 1997, p. 51). In Kracauer’s formula, space implicates the events which take place in that context. In doing so, a hermeneutic relationship evolves in which the disclosure of ideas is possible through a phenomenological analysis of the built environment. In the present work, this formula underpins my analysis of space, place, and the absence of reason. This relationship between space and the ideas which unconsciously embed themselves in that space requires careful consideration. Putting reason in a spatial context means identifying what grounds reason, and thus what con-

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stitutes its disbanding. Mere analysis of space alone will not constitute a sufficiently thorough examination of the structure of reason. Instead, reason must precede space. Only in that way can the displacement of reason be identified. Yet at the same time, the representation of reason in space is merely that. When we speak about classical architecture in terms of it being triumphant, we are conferring an association upon a specific physical feature, principally an arch, column, or pillar. In this instance, the bond between space and idea is contingent. That is, nothing can prevent a temple, as Heidegger noted, from losing its depth, and so being reduced to mere matter. This is evident in how monuments become anti-monuments as soon as their symbolic association has been subverted. Nonetheless, if an idea and a particular spatial configuration share the same property inherently, then the bond between them can be said to be intimate and necessary. In the following pages, I will argue that the unifying property which binds space and the absence of reason is nothingness. In the present context, the term “nothingness” does not refer to outright negation or a simple absence of presence, less even an active force which annihilates things. Instead, it will designate a specific and temporal dynamic which relies on the context that preceded it. Here, nothingness is the vantage point in which the absent past is traceable in the unformed present. Although indebted to Heidegger’s analysis of the Nothing, for the present investigation of nothingness, any such existential investigation in which freedom is defined against the conscience of the anxious subject bears no relevance and is rejected at the outset. Rather than being defined by a strictly redemptive dimension, the aspect of the Nothing which concerns us presently is its position as a mediating agent to contest the presence of reason. Nothingness is thus a volatile and active force, which gathers thought rather than destroying it. The scope for this inquiry into nothingness is aesthetics. If architecture embodies ideas, then aesthetic consideration of that space withdraws those ideas from their dormancy. This is what permits Kracauer’s urban flâneur to unmask the significance of the hotel lobby, as Kracauer writes: “The person sitting around idly is overcome by a disinterested satisfaction in the contemplation of a world creating itself, whose purposiveness is felt without being associated with any representation of purpose” (Ibid., p. 176). Thereafter, the hotel lobby becomes an aesthetic artifact emerging against a Kantian backdrop. While outright aestheticism remains a questionable prospect, not least because it supposes itself to be autonomous from morality, the correspondence between the idea and the mind which is receptive to that idea means that aesthetic experience creates a fortuitous opening in which recognition is affirmed. This interplay between space and time testifies

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to the ontological value of aesthetics, and so justifies the epistemological value of aesthetics in the first instance. How then does the inquiry into nothingness proceed? Since nothingness is particular, it is also finite in its embodiment; as the temporal conditions alter, it loses its clarity. Thus, if reason is centered around the will to permanency, then the space which resists that drive will be vulnerable to mutability, uncertainty, and fragmentation. Moreover, if reason prevents progress from being open to criticism, then the space, or as we will discover, place, which opposes this dynamic will likely be marginalized if not wholly vilified. Accordingly, this dynamic converges in the place of decay, and so fulfills the embodied absence of reason.

III Through falling from its previous function, and thus outliving the use originally conferred upon it, the ruin transgresses and subverts our everyday encounter with space and place. In the space of order and regulation, boundaries are delimited and linear. Being in place means knowing the limits of that place. So long as those limits are respected, then indeterminacy is evaded and the impression of space as productive can be maintained. At the same time, urban space undergoes domestication until it gathers a sense of how it ought to be. Rendering its structural properties apparently a priori, the space for malleability automatically assumes a deviant quality. If delimited space is productive, then space which broaches those boundaries will be termed wasted or otherwise expendable. In the ruin, the elements of waste and marginalization are crystallized. Here, the ruins of principal concern are those found on the fringes and in the center of the urban landscape. Though classical ruins feature in this book, abandoned asylums, derelict factories, and decayed piers take precedence. Since they have been reduced to aesthetic artifacts and that alone, Roman, Grecian, and other such ancient ruins can no longer serve as objects which subvert our philosophical assumptions concerning rational progress. This is not to say that their aesthetic merits perish with this absence of discordance. Instead, it means that they have been entrenched, so domesticated, in the sphere of the heritage trail. Monumentalism remains, after all, another commodity of social servility which strives to maintain an abstract impression of the past. Through being “rationalized” as historically significant, they sacrifice their original potency only to be redefined as delimited and prohibited spaces. In the docility of ruins, preservation is enforced as the justified re-

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sponse. As will be evident, this ethics is only tenable so long as reason is said to be sovereign. The ruins of contemporary society, latent on the urban landscape, are privileged spaces, which simultaneously invoke reactions of repulsion and sublimity. Temporally intimate with our own age, they have yet to submit to simple aestheticism, which annihilates their potential to disrupt convention. Instead, these ruins are close enough to the present to mirror an alternative past/present/future. A derelict factory testifies to a failed past but also reminds us that the future may end in ruin. Their use outmoded, the negative associations of the ruins are enforced. Nonetheless, the apparently unaesthetic quality of the ruin belies a force which disproves accusations of it being “ugly” and “wasted.” Instead of being relegated to the wastelands, literally or otherwise, the ruin proves its epistemological value as it undermines the residue of certainty and so forges a new criterion for knowledge. The aesthetic pleasure which derives from modern ruins, broadly a postindustrial form of the sublime, is inextricably bound with the ontological assertion that the ruin tacitly embodies. As this balance between ontology and aesthetics is understood, so the aesthetic quality of the ruin emerges. Instead of being marginalized as pernicious or otherwise antithetical to productive space, the ruin creates a center of its own. Celebrating ruins does not entail domesticating and nullifying them. A central objective of this book is to instigate a reappraisal of the relationship between place and memory. Aestheticizing ruins without being heedful of their eventual dissolution means aspiring to own them either through preservation or by dint of abstracting them from their context. Such a beautification of the ruin succumbs to a wholly romantic perspective. Instead of opening the space in which rational progress is contested, the static identification of ruins, through rendering them novelties, implicates a detachment whereby the ruin’s powers are diluted. Mere delight means truncating the ruin’s dissolution.

IV Despite being a marginalized topic, the present literature, research, and interest in ruins is broad, and becoming more so. While much literature on ruins proves successful in terms of evoking the visceral atmosphere of the ruin, the failure to situate these evocations against an ontological background means that the same literature often limits itself to cultural studies, in a literal sense. We are told much about the “feel” of ruins but little about what they might imply conceptually. Can one speak of a philosophy of ruination? I will demonstrate its application here.

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By allowing the ruin to exist on its own terms, without affixing to it a determinate social end other than its own collapse, the subversion of reason forces the question of dwelling to emerge. If rational progress undergoes doubt by way of the ruin, then the prospect of our being-in-place needs to be called into question. In doing so, the ruin takes on a significance which exceeds its aesthetic merits and impressionistic evocations and becomes a symbol able to redefine the concept of dwelling. A disclaimer, then: while the representation of ruins and their social significance play an important role in this book, my concern is not so much with ruins in a social context as it is with the idea of the ruin in a philosophical context; the ruin finds its place in this book insofar as it embodies a challenge to the notion of rational progress. The concern is not with what occurs in the ruin, or the social fallout, but how we (by which I mean post-industrial Western culture) relate to an object fallen from its supposed permanency. Readers who feel that a discussion of urban decay ought to consider economical and political considerations primarily risk disappointment here. In writing this book, my overarching aim has been to address the relationship between reason, memory, and dwelling. My rationale has been inspired by philosophy’s reluctance to address the connection between a dominant past now absent and the notion of dwelling in the present which is nevertheless determined by its past. Dwelling, not only a relationship between poverty and future prospects, is considered in terms of what it entails for a principle of thought in general, not only the manifestation of that principle. Thus, my analysis of dwelling takes up a theory of consciousness and a theory of being-in-place. This has meant that an analysis of reason, memory, and dwelling has preceded the discussion of ruin and decay. Phenomenological recourse to the ruin is the method of argumentation adopted in this book. The ruin becomes an ally in its ability to demonstrate the absence of reason. This does not entail a utilitarian application of the ruin, nor does it mean that the ruin gains its identity through philosophical analysis. Instead, it means working alongside the ruin in a manner that does not suggest either transforming or redeeming the ruin from its present state. In effect, this method precludes the subsequent theory of ruination from being comprehensive. This is deliberate. The laudable task of uniting the experience of ruins would not be possible here because the ruin is considered from a distinct perspective. With this said, a final note about Walter Benjamin, and how the present project differs from an approach characterized by critical theory. Benjamin’s study of the allegory of ruins, principally in The Origins of German Tragic Drama but also in The Arcades Project, is insightful and influential. According to Benjamin, in the absence of a theology which central-

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izes mutability, by the act of falling from completion, the ruin beckons the truth of the earth: that human existence is determined by its lack of determinacy and that the allegorical context of the ruin mirrors rather than disproves this fall into indeterminacy. He writes: “The allegorical has its existence in abstractions; as an abstraction, as a faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at home in the Fall” (Benjamin, 1988, p. 233). At home in the Fall, the finite narration of human life forms a reciprocal bond with the ruin. For Benjamin, meditation on the ruin does not entail a morbid fatalism but an engagement with the encoded message implicit though hidden in society. In turn, the unraveling of this encryption gives way to aesthetic pleasure: “In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are…Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last” (Ibid., p. 235). The fragmented and incidental become central motifs in Benjamin’s writings on history and progress. This is especially evident in his writings on capitalism and socioeconomics. In the decaying arcades of pre-war Paris, Benjamin saw the reflected image of surplus commodity. Just as the value of commodity is removed from the labor that brought about that object, a theme central to Marxism, so the ruin appears to suffer from a lack of inherent value. Instead, market relations dictate the value of a commodity; the origin of the object, meanwhile, falls into obscurity. The purely cosmetic meaning that commodities evoke is countered by the ruin in that the place of decay constitutes a fundamental break with that which preceded it, allowing it to conceive a new “origin” which refuses the capitalist logic of novelty and supposed improvement. Under the veil of this logic, the past is effectively erased while progress is equated to the refinement of the already-lived. A critical dialectic is at work in Benjamin’s account of the ruin. Ruins remain marginalized from the space of production and commerce and so appear surplus. But by dint of their wasted constitution, ruins shatter the myth of rational progress and permanency, in their abundance and in their necessity. Whereas the capitalist logic classifies things in terms of their productive value, thereby rendering entire industries obsolete not long after they began, the logic of the ruin contests this assumption. In dereliction, the ruin attests to the inherently tenuous foundations of the logic of capitalism: what was once built to testify to a singular and eternal present becomes the symbol and proof of its mutability. Although Benjamin’s analysis of the ruin proves successful in terms of identifying the socioeconomic mechanisms which determine the logic of capitalism, his neglect to confront the question of dwelling is notable. Hence,

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while the present book is implicitly indebted to Benjamin’s analysis of capitalism, along with his theory of history, which I will examine in due course, I deviate from Benjamin in seeking to phenomenologically situate ruins in the center of dwelling rather than maintain them as objects capable of catalyzing social reform. My focus is not on the social significance of decay and waste, which reduces them to a utilitarian purpose, but rather the ontological value of that decay. Whereas decay and ruin have predominately been employed in a transformative guise, conferring a supposed legitimacy upon then, in my consideration they require no further justification. In their incompletion, they are already complete.

Part One

Memories Unbound Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything. Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing

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Tarrying with the Nothing A nothing We were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing —, the no one’s rose. Paul Celan, “Psalm” (2001, p. 179)

I In an episode from Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt, the title character is instructed to tune a piano at the house of a friend. Failing the task, the distress caused by the incident, Beckett writes, “was not so much that he did not know what had happened, for he did not care what had happened, as that nothing had happened, that a thing that was nothing had happened, with the utmost formal distinctness, and that it continued to happen, in his mind, he supposed, though he did not know exactly what that meant” (Beckett, 1953, p. 76). Whether or not we can begin to conceive of nothingness, even less write about it, is a central problem in Beckett’s text. The principal thought arising from this passage is how “nothing had happened”? When a thing happens, it defines itself through existing, and all the more so when we remember it. For the protagonist in Beckett’s novel, to say, “nothing had happened” is to suggest that no event had happened despite a reference to something. How is this so? The question seems to necessitate failure. In the first instance, to speak about nothing is to evince a celebrated logical paradox. It appears to employ a counterfeit use of “nothing” which has the consequence of rendering something ineffable seemingly effable. According to this view, the mere mention of nothing, nothingness, indeed zero, presupposes a context in which the act of negation must materialize or otherwise become apparent. To this extent, any mention of nothingness is always with reference to the thing it is negating, without it ever being isolated as such. Can we infer that nothingness is an “impure” concept, relying upon “something” for its foundation? To consider the notion of pure nothingness, an autonomous concept would have to be present, thus removed from any “thing” delimiting its scope. Yet how this transparency can exist without there being a “thing” that nothingness negates in advance is unclear. This is not a novel problem. The

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historical and philosophical linage concerned with unraveling the paradox of nothingness is broad. In ancient Mesopotamia, the first use of the zero was recorded. Here, the use of the zero was to indicate what had preceded an empty space. In his The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, Robert Kaplan tells us that the circular shape of the zero derives from the serrations made in sand when one of the round pebbles used for counting was removed (Kaplan, 1999, pp. 4–7). That this would substantiate the belief that no such thing as “pure” nothingness exists is confirmed by the intra-dependence the serrations in the sand have upon the pebbles previously removed. The presence of nothingness can only be a detected because what was is now, in some sense, absent. Consider then, the oddity of a philosopher who claims that holding out into the “Nothing” is symptomatic of grasping Being (with a capital “B”) in its totality. Yet as Eli Diamond writes, against precisely this context the core of Heidegger’s philosophy grew: “For Heidegger, the Nothing is the impetus of our approach to what is most real in the world, although beyond essence and existence: the One, or Being” (Diamond, 2001, p. 201). The implicit logic in this correlation is that nothingness is prior to being, so justifying the metaphysical question: why something rather than nothing? It is a question that haunted Heidegger throughout his academic life. Heidegger’s onus on the Nothing (das Nicht) derives from his preoccupation with “uncovering the original meaning of Being,” a meaning that he believes Western philosophy has forgotten. When Heidegger writes about this forgetfulness of the original meaning of Being, what he has in mind is Being as taken for granted rather than an outright amnesia. We have become too acclimatized to the world, to the extent that we have lost sight of why such things as beings exist in the first place. We take it as self-evident that Being is at all. Such is our everyday intimate proximity with Being that our habitual familiarity with it has meant that its overarching significance has been lost in a “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) manner. Through approaching the world as a solely ontic phenomenon (that is, as a being), the ontological aspect (that is, as a Being) is neglected. Western metaphysics and science, according to Heidegger, has only concerned itself with the “what” of being: what is manifest in its outward representation. Physics, chemistry, and biology are engaged with the specific aspects of phenomena which, being essential to experience, remain dependent upon and presuppose the underlining Being for their existence. A mistaken reliance on particular disciplines, suggests Heidegger, coupled with a conviction that epistemologically such disciplines are absolute, entails a neglect of the wholeness of Being. Heidegger writes: “The question of Being aims therefore at ascertaining the a priori conditions not only for the possibility of the sciences which examine entities

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as entities of such and such a type, and in so doing already operate with an understanding of Being, but also for the possibility of those ontologies themselves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their foundations” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 2). By inverting the priority that the ontic dimension has over the ontological dimension, Heidegger will seek to reclaim the totality of Being by placing it firmly within the grasp of Dasein (the being-there of beings). We now turn to the means by which he seeks to invert the priority. We find Heidegger’s exposition of the Nothing, and its transcendental possibility, most evident in his short lecture, “What is Metaphysics?” The essay begins on a note of procedure by proposing to answer the given question, what is metaphysics?, by circumventing the question and instead tackling an actual metaphysical question. Only in this way, he tells us, will we arrive at what metaphysics is. The Nothing arises through Heidegger’s contention that science excludes the Nothing from its scope of inquiry. Science presupposes itself to inquire into the specifics of being, the “this” and the “that” and nothing else. Heidegger, not content with this dismissal, probes the question “what about this Nothing?” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 97). The Nothing gives rise to the possibility of being, which firstly oppresses and secondly evokes wonder in consciousness, causing the question “why” to emerge. The Nothing leads to metaphysics, since it is the Nothing which “puts us, the questioners, in question. It is, writes Heidegger, “a metaphysical question” (Ibid., p. 111). So, with Heidegger as taskmaster, we are led into an expedition to expose this neglected Nothing. Already we are faced with our original problem of how we can unearth the Nothing without recourse to positing a predicate upon it, so rendering it a something. Phenomenological thinking is always intentional, that is, directed toward something as opposed to nothing, as Heidegger says: “phenomenology means…to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 58). To let an object “show” itself means to allow it to appear, or make itself known. Yet this phenomenology of the Nothing seems destitute when it comes to disclosing itself. Heidegger, anticipating this criticism, argues that its force is only tenable in accordance with formal logic, specifically the Law of Non-Contradiction. The law, which finds its heritage in Aristotle, and was not broken until Hegel, declares that a “thing” cannot both be and be its own negation simultaneously. The full extent of this claim is measurable when we contrast it with pre-Socratic philosophy. Consider, in the first instance, Heraclitus, who affirmed becoming over being and so advocated a philosophy of vitality and flux. Heraclitus’ thought recognized, indeed placed central, polarities unre-

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servedly. With the arrival of Parmenides, the Heraclitean flux grew in disrepute. For Parmenides, we can investigate what does exist or we can investigate what does not exist, but we cannot investigate both. When pushed, Parmenides will admit that the investigation of non-existence is groundless, since we cannot logically investigate what does not exist: hence, every subject of inquiry must be existent. Through studying the Nothing in terms of logic alone, Parmenides’ thought had the consequence of implying a nonspatial, non-temporal existence that suggests no conciliation of change. Aware of Parmenides’ error, Democritus sought to resolve the conflict between being and nothingness by emphasizing the roles of atoms in the void. For Heidegger, Democritus’ atomism defines itself as a characteristic of being, and so maintains complicity with the Law of Non-Contradiction. Heidegger believes that tradition and dogma have clouded any attempt to unearth the Nothing from the root of Being. In Aristotle, this dogma reaches its summit whereby it has rendered any investigation into the Nothing futile. Heidegger is perplexed: since the Law of Non-Contradiction presupposes the possibility of negation by the intellect, how can the law emerge without the presence of the Nothing? For Heidegger, they are entwined. Negation, “no” and the “not” are dependent upon the Nothing for their negativity just as they are dependent upon Being. Such is the core of Heidegger’s thesis.

II We have found ourselves assured of the Nothing but unsure as to where it is to be found. Suggesting that the Nothing reveals itself in death proves ineffective. As Wittgenstein and Heidegger noted, “death is not an event, but a phenomenon to be understood existentially in an eminent sense...” (Ibid., p. 233). In a similar vein, Kant also remarks that, “nobody can experience his own death (since it requires life in order to experience); he can only observe it in others” (Kant, 1978, p. 55). The objectification of death thus distances it as an experience in the category of other experiences. Reduced to appearances, the exterior manifestation of death precludes an interior competent. Eschewing this limitation, Heidegger situates nothingness in an immediate fashion, thus contesting an unreachable metaphysics by positing it within the grasp of Being. The mode of being which discloses nothingness, Heidegger argues, is anxiety. Anxiety is the sliding away of things which enforces the gradual recess of the unity of being from where we find ourselves stranded in a disembodied, and so placeless, sphere of groundlessness. “We ‘hover’ in anxiety,” he tells us (Heidegger, 1977, p. 97). Concurrently, this hovering unveils the nullity in which Dasein finds its own definition.

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Heidegger’s account of anxiety is characterized by an existential framework that takes its inspiration from Kierkegaard, and was later adopted by Sartre, Jaspers, and Marcel. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a call to the vertiginousness of freedom, to the presence of possibility and the exclusion that this possibility entails. Sartre affirms Kierkegaard’s vertiginousness of freedom while endorsing it with the presence of inward-negation: “I distrust myself and my own reactions” (Sartre, 1956, p. 29). This inner contingency renders freedom a burden upon consciousness, since it places freedom as solely responsible for what it is, so evoking the anxiety of the existential conscience. Heidegger agrees with Kierkegaard and Sartre in the emphasis on anxiety as an ontological disclosure and the groundlessness therein. Nevertheless, anxiety, Heidegger is keen to tell us, should not be compounded with fear. Bound by the object it seeks to surmount, fear is rooted in the phenomenon itself, while anxiety, resting upon a non-spatial, non-temporal precipice, exists ontologically. The Nothing, then, entails a strange attraction for Dasein. In the essence of the Nothing awaits the nihilation of the individual being, but within this nihilation lies the actual revelation of Being: “In the clear night of the Nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings—and not Nothing” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 105). This revelation of Being is riddled with ambivalence. To be conscious of Being is to be conscious of finitude. Heidegger’s Nothing gives rise to authentic Dasein, by which he means a courageous confrontation with the givens of Being (i.e. death, freedom, and anxiety). The Nothing does not, we discover, purport to be purely negative. Indeed, for Heidegger, “Dasein means: being held out into the Nothing” (Ibid.). This “holding out” implies a continuity of being despite the absorption of the Nothing.

III We see that with the experience of anxiety, invoking repulsion and attraction simultaneously, the Nothing presents itself. In turn, this has the consequence of disclosing the “openness of Being,” which for Heidegger is a revelatory and therefore privileged state. While Heidegger’s correlation between anxiety and the Nothing demonstrates a persuasive logic that relies on the ineffability of nothingness and anxiety, his account of the Nothing remains ambiguous. Firstly, we discover the awkward correlation between anxiety and the Nothing despite their outward compatibility. That anxiety, groundless and without end, should be equated with the Nothing lies with disquiet on Heidegger’s account. Epistemologically, the disquiet is traceable to a divi-

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sion between consciousness and self-consciousness. If the self is dissolved through anxiety, as Heidegger claims, how can it recognize the Nothing without being distinct from it? Knowing the Nothing presupposes knowing what the Nothing is not. Yet if the only occasion in which the Nothing unfurls is when consciousness is absent, then this lack of space for distinction means that consciousness is never in a position to stand outside of itself. Furthermore, we would do well to recall that Heidegger’s usage of anxiety is largely a platform whereby his fixation on being qua being can emerge. Equally, we would also do well not to forget the temporal context in which the issue of anxiety arose. Walter Kaufmann writes correctly that, “Heidegger’s talk about anxiety should be read as a document of the German 1920s, when it suddenly became fashionable to admit one was afraid” (Kaufmann, 1976, p. 202). It is logical that the indeterminacy of anxiety evades any specific quality, so enforcing a metaphysical impression. As a result, the question of being anxious in a particular place is a question that would reduce the metaphysical disclosure of the “openness of Being” to a mere experience limited by spatial and temporal categories. As we have seen, the mood of anxiety, for Heidegger, is purely abstract: an absence by which the Nothing emerges. Against this fixation on Being, the prospect of a self-conscious reflection upon the Nothing is lost, while anxiety “proves thereby to be a ‘metaphysical’ question” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 109). This simple dichotomy between anxiety and the Nothing is incomplete. While it is true that Sartre would later posit nothingness in a more definite fashion, affixing it to a sense of conscious indeterminacy, even there nothingness is reduced to an absolute, whereby the preparation for an ethics between authenticity and inauthenticity is implicitly engineered. This surreptitious use of a metaphysical ethics founded in anxiety is also foreshadowed by Heidegger. Despite a lack of reference toward being-toward-death in “What is Metaphysics?,” the overtones of (the already written) Being and Time are visible. Not least the redeeming possibility of death as a liberator from the clutches of “the they” by corresponding with death as a certain possibility. In “What is Metaphysics?,” we find this redemptive aspect transposed to a distinction, not between Dasein and death, but between science and Being. By way of a conclusion, Heidegger writes: Scientific existence possesses its simplicity and aptness in that it relates to beings themselves in a distinctive way and only to them. Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand. But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing (Ibid., p. 111).

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At stake in Heidegger’s account of metaphysics is an ethics of inquiry that can only be realized if science “dares” to engage with what it had originally discarded. This response to “the crisis of European science,” which Edmund Husserl had already initiated, entails Heidegger manipulating the question of anxiety to the extent that it is no longer consistent with knowing the Nothing. By way of contrast, the task confronting Heidegger is to demonstrate how science has been led astray by not seeing how the Nothing is, as he deems, the pathway toward the openness of Being.

IV My objective is not to refute Heidegger’s metaphysics through expounding a counter-argument teased in logic and persuasion. Instead, I will seek to reclaim the Nothing from its anxious roots and place it within a spatial realm while simultaneously retaining its metaphysical significance. Insofar as Heidegger has correlated the experience of anxiety with the metaphysics of the Nothing, I am in disagreement. In the present context, I will make two assumptions. Firstly, that the presence of anxiety is entirely separate from the Nothing. Secondly, that only through a pre-reflective meditation on what nothingness is can its character unfold as such. In the following pages, the overall aim will be to sketch this view of spatialized nothingness from the vantage point of self-consciousness: in that way, its entirety will be realized.

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Silence, Violence, and Nothingness Music does more than intensify the impression of the visual image by providing a parallel illustration of the same idea; it opens up the possibility of a new, transfigured impression of the same material: something different in kind. Andrey Tarkovsky (1986, p. 158)

I The disagreement that follows from reading Heidegger’s essay stems from the claim that, “Anxiety reveals the Nothing” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 103). We are confronted with the incompatibility of a psychological account of a philosophical problem. Heidegger has sought to bring the Nothing down to earth. In doing so, he has delimited it to a particular mode of being. At the same time, the possibility of nothingness becoming psychological is consistent with a phenomenological analysis. Ideas often take shape when they are animated in the mind and not simply left inert in the text. For Heidegger, however, we find the supposition that the Nothing can be explicated and therefore resolved by treating anxiety as a privileged mood. Since anxiety ruptures the stability of consciousness, any such space to characterize the Nothing is also lost. Anxiety might well evoke a metaphysical feeling, however vague it might be, but unless we can distance ourselves from the giddiness of that feeling, discerning its structure will prove evasive. If anxiety precludes the Nothing from emerging, then through what means can we begin to explore it? To speak about the Nothing suggests enforcing a fixed concept upon it, so rendering it a “thing.” But as Heidegger says, “this being beyond being we call transcendence” (Ibid., p 105). As such, we must enter its kingdom indirectly, resisting familiarity in the process. To this extent, the notion of pure inquiry would be illogical. If the Nothing were predicated upon nothing, then we would have to look beyond appearances to discover it, to Heidegger’s “transcendence.” How can we gain an impression of transcendence if the invitation is absent? What will lead us toward nothingness if, by dint of its essence, the Nothing eludes us? A fortuitous opening would have to emerge in which we were led by the traces of what had already been in contact with nothingness. On the surface of things, where nothingness appears to have sunken into retreat, how can we find a mediating agent between transcendence and experience? The question

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is: does the phenomenology of experience disclose an allusion to nothingness, whereby we can reconstruct a pathway that is otherwise lost in pure inquiry? The presence of silence, when sufficiently forceful to recall its origin, is, I will seek to prove, the interceding agent between pure experience and pure nothingness. Silence, like the Nothing, is absent upon inspection: we do not find it “there” as such. Silence, again like the Nothing, is contextual and perpetually relates to what it lacks. It exists, as the Nothing does, as an echo of its origin, as a shadow of a past place. What is silent, therefore, must stand as a repercussion of this non-silence just as Being arises from the resonance of the Nothing. To encounter the Nothing we must be led by silence. The space that this silence leaves must be our guide. Let us suppose we can think of silence in terms of being a presence. Through meditating its arrival passively, there is nothing to define a place of silence. A room that is slowly emptied of its contents fails to make a firm distinction between presence and absence, since the two often become indistinguishable. Instead, the background morphs into the foreground and viceversa. In itself, the presence of silence is reduced to an abstraction, undefined and in need of an outward form. Inversely, silence which becomes apparent through violently disjoining with the present context, becoming identifiable with a negation of the present, elevates itself to the absolute. Such is the way when a room suddenly becomes empty: the absence is felt more deeply. Silence must emerge and thereafter define itself by a disjunctive origin that renders the space intrinsically negative. We come into contact with this absolute form of silence when it arises from a violent dynamic that explodes before subduing. In this lingering subduing, the possibility of the presence of silence occurs. How, then, shall we form an impression of this dynamic between violence and silence? An utterance of language cannot occur without it interrupting the place of silence. In that opening, language degrades silence by signifying it, aspiring to mould it according to an arbitrary measure. While this particular silence might lend itself toward language, what is absent in pure description is the universality of silence. Yet it is a universality reclaimed in the production of the aesthetic idea. “Above all else,” writes Camille Mauclair, “silence, the crystallization of the soul sleeping in peace far removed from the present; sacred silence…sweet taciturnity which allows us to hear the inner melody” (cited in Jullian, 1971, p. 251). Let us consider music. Unlike direct language, music is non-relational. It is autonomous in that it circumvents formal description. We do not confer formal properties on an indeterminate subject. Instead, we regard music as

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having a language of its own. This is confirmed in Schopenhauer’s persuasive account of the metaphysics of music. According to Schopenhauer, the expression of music is never mere outward representation, but always of the thing-in-itself. “The (Platonic) Ideas are the adequate objectification of the will,” Schopenhauer writes in the third book of World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 257). Schopenhauer’s dualistic conception of the world establishes a hierarchy of knowledge, defined in gradients. The epistemological structure is implicated in conceptual thought and is manifest in aesthetic experience. Thus, for Schopenhauer, the arts fall into a hierarchical model whereby the objectification of the will, being Schopenhauer’s thing-in-itself, differs as representation penetrates appearances. With music, representation is left behind, since direct access to the will is gained. Schopenhauer writes: “Thus music is an immediate objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is” (Ibid.). The essential quality of music means that it overpowers the other arts by being able to circumvent individuation. As a result, universality is the domain of music. “Music,” he writes, “does not express this or that particular pain and definite pleasure, this or that affliction, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment or peace of mind, but joy, pain, sorrow, horror, gaiety, merriment, peace of mind themselves…” (Ibid., p. 261). By relating the metaphysical properties of music to the experience of silence, we can see how a piece of music that aspires toward silence but lacks the distinction between radical violence and the sudden removal of that violence thus fails to attain silence. John Cage’s “4’33” is exemplary in this respect. Is there silence in the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of non-activity? No sound certainly. A lack of sound does not necessarily imply silence though. About Cage’s piece, Alfred Schnittke writes how, “The hearing of the audience is sharpened by their expectations, and they perceive the inevitable inadvertent noises in the concert hall (even the quietest ones) as a kind of premusic” (Schnittke, 2002, p. 150). Through lacking a context in which silence can stand outside of itself, the piece, rather than demonstrating the tensions of silence, undermines the possibility of silence by falling into vague abstraction. Further, by regarding itself as an intrinsic unity devoid of the violent conception that silence requires, Cage’s “4’33” is rendered a cell of sound that awaits the presence of silence. For silence to be rendered visible, it must rely upon a dynamic stasis between violence and the deserted space that violence leaves.

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II To the extent that silence is bound with the violence that precedes it, its consummated expression is to be found in the music of the Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. Kancheli’s musical landscape derives from a context that emerges in a loose parallel with the fall of the Soviet Union. The gradual fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of glasnost enabled Kancheli to place names upon his work that hitherto had seemed overly political: “Bright Sorrow,” “Mourned by the Wind,” “Life without Christmas.” Rather than bearing a solely political content, Kancheli’s work implicates an existential dimension which exceeds the confines of academic composition. Thus, the political becomes the existential and so sounds the voice of revolt, anguish, and loss. Aesthetically, Kancheli’s music is oriented around this polarity between silence and violence, between the voice of hope and the oppressive response hope receives. For Kancheli, silence is only possible once this disjunction has been established. Indeed, Kancheli has written how he is, Particularly amazed by the mysterious silence that precedes the birth of sound. There is also a type of sound after which silence is perceived like music. We all have deeply personal feelings that we try to express in different ways and music ‘which catches us off guard’ does not need to be made concrete. And still, silence is prepared by music and silence itself becomes music. My dream is to achieve that kind of silence (www.artangel.org.uk/pdfs/silence.pdf, 2003).

Elsewhere, the composer writes that, “in my own evaluation of my music, silence…has become the most important criterion.” In the case of Kancheli's “Sixth Symphony” (1981), this criterion is explicit. Already in the prelude, Kancheli has established a background whereby silence becomes the form which determines the presence of sound. The two viola players, each of whom is concealed behind a screen at the composer’s request, mimic the drone of a Georgian chianuri. An absence of movement, an absence of sound, the occasional flicker of the harp ascending a semi-tone. The evocation of subdued grief, each note seeking to dive deeper than its predecessor, is suddenly ruptured by the aggression of the orchestra. The attack is so terse that when the violas do reappear, it as though nothing has changed. Thereafter, the aspiration toward ascent is gradually thwarted by increasingly frequent staccato attacks of the orchestra, each of which nostalgically recollects what was previously destroyed. Throughout the work, Kancheli seems to be establishing his home in the place of absence. The extreme disjunction that frames Kancheli’s “Sixth Symphony” between activity and passivity, between the reticent speculation of melody and the violent oppression of

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rhythm, allows the space in between to hang as a mournful silence that conveys the recovery of the violence. In the coda to Kancheli’s “Sixth Symphony,” this space to mourn is realized through an extended and dying passage that appears tarnished by the violence that has preceded it. For Kancheli, it is this mourning and the space that has been deserted by the violence that becomes silence. In Kancheli’s “Vom Winde beweint” (1984), the dynamic stasis between violence and silence is expressed inversely by placing priority upon the violence. The determinate silence which framed the “Sixth Symphony” is displaced by an immediate discordance, restraining any preceding modulation with the oppressive suppression of the first chord. The dissonance that shadows the opening of the piece, a fortissimo memento mori, expires with vast lassitude as the violas oscillate mournfully between two almost static notes. This profound and timeless moment introduces us to an anxious landscape whereby the birth of silence gathers momentum as the memory of violence begins to encroach. “It is well known,” writes Schopenhauer, “that all the high notes, light, tremulous, and dying away more rapidly, may be regarded as resulting from the simultaneous vibrations of the deep bass-notes” (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 258). Schopenhauer’s correlation between the “simultaneous vibrations” of the past and the remaining notes, which result from the persistence of those vibrations, is laid bare in the first movement of Kancheli’s “Vom Winde beweint.” We witness the threshold of silence. Unless violence threatens to destroy the very matter it conceives, silence is thus formed. For Schopenhauer, “the deep bass [represents] the crudest mass; its rising and falling occur only in the large intervals, in thirds, fourths, fifths, never by one tone…” (Ibid., p. 259). Schopenhauer is right to align the bass timbre with mass. With the intervals of the fifth and forth, musical space is acquired. We noticed this in the disrupted landscape of Kancheli’s “Vom Winde beweint.” Yet the disruption of violence encounters an ambiguous silence when spaciousness becomes compressed. In Kancheli’s “Fifth Symphony” (1977), the establishment of musical clarity, determined by the spaciousness of the forth and fifths, is countered by the temporally indeterminate use of the minor sixth. The structural similarity between the opening of “Vom Winde beweint” and the “Fifth Symphony” is replicated with the distinction between distance and spaciousness. In this symphony, a harpsichord prefigures the memento mori chord. The reserved opening is again shattered. Yet out of that disruption, musical space becomes formless. The minor sixth occupies a point in between space, mediating the arrival of violence, but itself becoming a presence of silence simultaneously. The tension inherent in the

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minor sixth, compelling it toward the dominant, is suspended in Kancheli. In the place of resolution, we hear a silence that is at once irresolute and in the process of becoming. Returning to “Vom Winde beweint,” we discover that the becoming of silence is volatile. In the second movement of Kancheli’s score, the lack of equality between silence and violence intensifies. The striving toward movement and progression is disrupted, often illogically, by the reprisal of Kancheli’s memento mori chord. The evocation is of subdued grief and a loss that, while lit by a reprise of light, is never oblivious to its abrasive conception. Kancheli writes: “Probably a page, a blank page containing a faint trace of dried tears could tell us everything or almost everything about the contents of the Liturgy (Kancheli, 1992, p. 5). This blank page, a myriad silence, is again marked by loss. Here, however, the anticipation that the discordance will resolve, unlike the “Sixth Symphony,” is absent.

III I have discussed the struggle between violence and silence, manifest aesthetically in the act of dynamic stasis, to expose the absence violence leaves, which aligns with the structure of mourning. Mourning, therefore, is the deserted space silence occupies, carried out in lived experience. Into this space, we have sought to bring the nothingness into the light. Yet the space has only been experienced as something contingent, only as something that may have been otherwise. Aesthetic experience is passed through passively if not exposed to necessity. Hence, so that the aesthetic experience of silence can be fulfilled by becoming the Nothing, consciousness requires recognizing itself in the mode of its otherness. The aspect of recognition is not foreign to aesthetic consciousness. The thread uniting consciousness with the aesthetic object is prefigured in Baudelaire’s famous poem “Correspondences”: Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walk within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing. As the long echoes, shadowy, profound, Heard from afar, blend in a unity, Vast as the night, as sunlight’s clarity, So perfumes, colors, sounds may correspond. Baudelaire, “Correspondences” (1993, p. 19)

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Baudelaire’s poem reminds us that aesthetic experience is framed by a correspondence between the object of aesthetic contemplation and the shape of the mind in which the object is recognized. As the two aspects converge, the exteriority of the object is seized through lived experience. Writing on the notion of beauty, Hegel provides a foundation for this Baudelairean notion when he states how, “…we find distinguished as the element of the beautiful something inward, a content, and something outer which has that content as its significance; the inner shows itself in the outer and gives itself to be known by its means, inasmuch as the outer points away from itself to the inner” (Hegel, 1993, p. 23). For Hegel, a reciprocal correspondence between the aesthetic form essential to the object and the experience of consciousness, against which the content of beauty is already known, means that aesthetic experience is possible. The artwork’s potency is thus realized when it objectivity defines what is dormant in the subjective mind. The Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff once wrote: “Art must objectivize the subjective. My soul is alone and nothing influences it. It is like a glass enclosed in silence, completely devoted to its interior spectacle” (cited in Jullian, 1971, p. 261). Objectifying the subjective presupposes the prior existence of the object within the subject. Already known means that the past is now re-presented aesthetically, as a representation. Yet the representation “crystallizes” (to echo Camille Mauclair’s term) what has been encountered but not recognized. We experience a past, but the same past eludes us as it retreats into dormant unconsciousness. The criterion for establishing the moment of recognition does not, however, necessarily entail a direct correspondence between subject and object. The recognition of the past, now represented aesthetically, compels a moment of strange familiarity in which neither consciousness nor the object discovers its place. Yet because of the efficacy of this strange murmuring, the reality of the bond is disclosed. Recognition does not extract a frozen image of the untouched past, but is led to reconstruct the past from the temporal perspective of the present. The indefinite unfolding of the past means that the unhomely aspect of recognition anticipates the fulfillment of recollection. The criterion is affirmed in Hegel’s aesthetic theory, where, the power of thinking spirit (mind) lies here, not merely to grasp itself only in its peculiar form of the self-conscious spirit (mind), but just as much to recognize itself in its alienation in the shape of the feeling and the sensuous, in its other form, by transmuting the metamorphosed thought back into definite thoughts, and so restoring it to itself (Hegel, 1993, p. 15).

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By acknowledging the “other” aspect of itself, the mind does not “forget” itself, but instead discovers itself in the “undoing” of the unhomely (Ibid.). In Hegel’s meta-aesthetic framework, recognizing the universal in the particular forges the resolution between consciousness and alienation. Hence, that “truth could not be, did it not appear and reveal itself, were it not truth for someone or something, for itself as also for Mind,” means that recognition involves a gradual gathering of familiar unfamiliarity, whereby the content of the mind observes itself in the object of aesthetic contemplation (Ibid., p. 10). The idealistic quality of Hegel’s aesthetics is structurally resituated in my analysis of the Nothing. The “reality” of the Nothing is revealed as aesthetic consciousness “fixes” itself on the image represented. The fixing constitutes an ambiguous symmetry in which the mind becomes the determining agent. Encountering the Nothing, we simultaneously encounter ourselves, forgotten before being rediscovered. At the same time, the representation of nothingness is temporally particular and limited. If thinking about the nothing in spatial terms is possible, it is with reference to a representation which is limited to temporal conditions. We discover only what has been experienced in a specific temporal space and not what has yet to be experienced. Aesthetically, the relationship between temporal thought and spatial representation, also temporal, implicates a mode of hermeneutic engagement. I follow Gadamer in defining hermeneutics “as the bridging of personal or historical distance between minds” (cited in Cazeaux, 2000, p. 181). With the artwork intact, it remains inert without a dialectical struggle between mere matter and/or experience and the engagement of that work, until it has been raised to the level of aesthetic object. For Gadamer, “hermeneutics operates wherever what is said is not immediately intelligible” (Ibid., p. 183). The interpreting work of hermeneutics means that aesthetic experience exceeds sensual experience and crosses over into a reconstructive act of conceptual engagement. In his understanding of hermeneutics, Gadamer borrows a distinction from the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen marking the difference between sources and vestiges. “Vestiges,” Gadamer writes, “are fragments of a past world that have survived and assist us in the intellectual reconstruction of the world of which they are a remnant” (Ibid.). The unfamiliar continuation of past fragments will become, for us, the means by which a hermeneutic relationship with lived place reveals the temporal property able to convey the Nothing. As subjective consciousness recognizes itself in the remnants, which have managed to persist into the spatial present, sensitivity toward obscurity cultivates an understanding of time and place. The previously individuated mode of time is undermined as hermeneutics contests a view of history and place as fixed. “In the last analysis,” Gadamer

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writes, “Goethe’s statement ‘Everything is a symbol’ is the most comprehensive formulation of the hermeneutical ideal. It means that everything points to another thing” (Ibid., p. 186). In the work of art, the Promethean retrieval of the disconnected past proves the expansive scope of aesthetic experience. That the artist is the “thief of fire” is nothing unusual. Mythology tells us that the poet embodies the voice of the gods. Even here, Rimbaud’s voyant is foreseen as the blind poet inspired by the Muses whose vision has been blinded so that his inner experience is heightened. In Pythagoras, we discover aesthetics characterized as a disclosure of an ontological plane superior to our sensory interpretation; the cosmology of musical intervals is confirmation of this. Later still, Plato, despite his ambivalence toward the poet in the Republic, would write, “If there is anything worth living for, it is to contemplate beauty” (Plato, 1997, p. 451). With Plato, aesthetic contemplation arises by sacrificing the sensible world for a world of Forms. The beauty of the sensory world can only be a representation (mimesis) of the world beyond it, and thus is delimited to mimicking and not expression. This objectivity, which is implicit within Platonism, derives from the archetypal proportion and harmony the Forms denote. Platonic poets are mimics of the Form they seek to convey. The aspect of expression is hence extraneous. For Plato, if objectivity is to be acquired, the poet is merely a messenger of Forms inspired, not by subjective experience, but by the light of the Muses: “A poet is a light and winged and sacred thing, who is unable to compose until he has been inspired and put out of his senses, and his mind is no longer in him…God takes away the minds of these men and uses them as his ministers, just as he does soothsayers and godly seers” (Ibid., p. 534). Being devoid of reason or sensuous experience, the ecstasy that enables the poet to compose is itself an act of madness: “the best things come to us through madness, when it is sent as a gift of the Gods” (Ibid., p. 244). This sketch of Platonic aesthetic theory emphasizes the ontological value of aesthetics while expressing the bond between the artist and the artwork. In turn, I will align the aesthetic idea of the Nothing with the subject corresponding with that idea. Before then, we need to establish a criterion by which nothingness can be recognized. Without it, subject and object may converge without corresponding. Henceforth, the task ahead is hermeneutic, the context for nothingness is silence, and the space upon which nothingness rests is implicit in every sentence written.

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T H R E E

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An Uncanny Memory And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause: I think of my great swan, his gestures pained and mad, Like other exiles, both ridiculous and sublime, Gnawed by his endless longing! Baudelaire, “The Swan” (1993, p. 177)

I Until now, silence has been described as the space deserted by violence, while this in turn has been understood as an expression of the Nothing. Until we find the counterpart of silence, in which the mind can recognize itself, this account is impartial and the structure of the Nothing unfulfilled. Aesthetic experience only completes itself when the object of aesthetic contemplation is discovered by the self: that is, when the reciprocity between subject and object is established. Otherwise, space is reduced to a thing. A correspondence is required which binds the deserted space that nothingness occupies with the mind observing that space. When we integrate the previous chapter—the glimpse of the Nothing through silence, the disruption that preceded silence, the mourning that hung within the absent space—what unites these elements is the presence of memory. This is immediately evident when we consider that silence is never without the recollection of what preceded it, that mourning itself is an act of remembrance, and that the dynamic stasis that conceived silence presupposed the act of remembrance between what is now and what was then. Let us provisionally say that memory is intrinsic to the mournful space occupied by silence, and that, because of it existing through the silence, nothingness is therefore expressed. We need to explicate this dynamic to make it clear. We do not have to venture far to attest the primacy of memory and the role it plays in shaping experience. In the first instance, we find Bergson’s philosophy of memory, which demonstrates how perception is always constructed with reference to something outside of the object, a context that exists elsewhere. The object that I hold before me, according to Bergson, is mine insomuch as it is interpreted through my own memories and associations. Bergson writes, “Perception is never mere contact of the mind

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with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which complete it as they interpret it” (Bergson, 1999, p. 133). Pure perception, in the sense of perception being unmediated, presupposes a total divorce between mind and body, since any such lack of mediation would be an entirely physical and sensuous reaction. That implicates a failure in the form of an unthinking mass of material, namely, the body. If pure perception is unattainable, then the Kantian thing-in-itself will remain unknown to consciousness because self-consciousness necessarily relates to it subjectively and through prior experience. The experience of consciousness is founded in this act of selective remembrance. In experiencing my context, I do so with orientation to the memories that have preceded me. Consequently, those aspects of my context that reveal themselves to me will do so in connection to the memories that have already formed my experience. We find a distinction between gradients of memory in terms of their temporality. In a celebrated section of Matter and Memory, habit memory is opposed to independent recollection. Habit memory is characterized by a twofold aspect between learnt action and the unconscious employment of behavior (Bergson, 2004, p. 87). The body aids in the mediation between memory and matter, and so implicates its involvement in habit memory. Due to the exteriority of this association between memory and physicality, consciousness and memory maintain an impersonal bond framed by repetition: I study a lesson, and in order to learn it by heart I read it a first time, accentuating every line; I then repeat it a certain number of times. At each repetition there is progress; the words are more and more linked together, and at last make a continuous whole (Ibid., p. 89).

If the repetition constitutes a recollection, then it remains only an act of memory. In contrast, “spontaneous recollection...records, in the form of memory-images, all the events of our daily life as they occur in time; it neglects no detail; it leaves to each fact, to each gesture, its place and date” (Ibid., p. 92). The emplacement of memory, in correlation with its temporal counterpart, will continue to be a central aspect of this study to which we will return in due course. Yet the distinction is not without an evaluative assessment for Bergson. Habit memory manages to preserve the past only in a “systematic character. In truth, it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it” (Ibid., p. 93). Bergson is even reluctant to apply the term “memory,” but does so “because it prolongs their useful effect into the present memory” (Ibid.). Mere recollection, willed or unconscious, does not constitute an evocation of the past, despite the elevation of such memory to the “model of mem-

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ory” (Ibid., p. 95). The mechanism of memory-as-habit means that the total image of the past withdraws. Yet the withdrawal does not entail the annihilation of the memory image. The unrepeatable event reappears in “spontaneous recollection [which is] perfect from the outset; time can add nothing to its image without disfiguring it; it retains its memory and place in date” (Ibid., p. 95). The emplacement of memory renders it distinct. Unlike the impersonality of habit memory, which thus becomes peculiarly atemporal by being homogenized as habit, spontaneous recollection recalls memories once thought destroyed. In their rebirth, particularity is intimately involved whereas habit “merely” organizes events into a temporal-linear structure, which Bergson deems “artificial” (Ibid.). Two questions emerge. Firstly, what is the relationship that spontaneous recollection has to everyday consciousness, and secondly, how is the production of spontaneous recollection encouraged? Bergson’s description of the mental landscape is not unequivocal. Instead, the emergence and withdrawal of memory “into an immense zone of obscurity” takes place in a space mostly dominated by the enforcement of useful memory (Ibid., p. 97). The obscurity of memory, its temporal distance from our everyday consciousness, beckons to appear as the “equilibrium” between the two modes of memory is shattered, so allowing “these darkened images [to] come forward into the full light” (Ibid.). The shattering disruption is dreamlike. Before us, a new image unfolds. Yet the image is transient. We recall Benjamin: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 257). For Bergson, “the phantasm…disappears just at the moment when motor activity tries to fix its outline” (Bergson, 2004, p. 100). Mechanical action opposes and represses the image of the past in its totality. Hence, we are faced with a dynamic model of consciousness, which privileges a mode of disinterested reflection enforced by daydreaming. Voluntary memory emerges as an intrusion, not a facilitating agent of recovery. The disruption of mental equilibrium implicates an impetrative to readdress the so far “misunderstood…true nature of memory” (Ibid., p. 103). Let us phenomenologically observe how this disruption occurs.

II “Memories,” writes W.G. Sebald, “lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are awoken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life” (Sebald, 2002, p. 255). In the midst of semiconsciousness, the slumbering of memory can withdraw as reverie shadows

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volition. Unexpected and chance encounters thus invoke a realm already familiar to us. We are aware of such a moment as place encourages us to hover between the unfolding of the past and our self-conscious watchfulness of that unfolding. A rainy afternoon, once synonymous with dreariness, forces the mind toward soporific haze. With the outside unreachable and the curtains drawn, a precarious wavering between consciousness and unconsciousness unfolds. Often the wavering invites sensitivity to sudden sound and movement. With the distant sound of a foghorn, the shock of being resonates. In the moment, the mind reaches moments of undisturbed lucidity. “With the dust of sleep scarcely out of his eyes,” Baudelaire writes, “the material world offers him, in bold relief, an amazing clearness of outline and wealth of color. The world of spirit opens up huge perspectives, full of new glimpses” (Baudelaire, 1956, p. 66). Able to navigate our way through passages usually hidden in a volitional state, the entire past appears to unfold for us to live again. In the somnolence, we imagine familiar streets, now bustling with the activity of any space compressed beyond its means. Allowing the semi-conscious state to develop further, we are quickly among the crowd, overhearing conversations, allowing faint smells, tastes, and colors to revive memories buried beneath the veil of structuring-consciousness. Objects now point toward a place that is no longer present. In a puddle, an entire landscape of memory can unfold, reflecting in its grime evocations so distinct that they appear real. A sudden jolt that is transparency of the past. For a second, we are startled into consciousness, before resuming the dreamlike state. Concurrently, space does not limit the dreamer geometrically. The mediation between consciousness and unconsciousness means that both aspects sift into the other. Now, unambiguous dreaming has been disrupted. We are in an unfiltered dreamscape in which past and present, remembered reality and imagined unreality impregnate one another. About this situation, Schopenhauer has written: Thus, there is a state in which we certainly sleep and dream; yet we dream only the reality itself that surrounds us. We then see our bedroom with everything therein; we become aware of people entering the room; and we know that we are in bed and that everything is correct and in order. And yet we are asleep with our eyes; we dream; only what we dream is true and real...this state is much more difficult to distinguish from wakefulness than is the ordinary dream... (Schopenhauer, 2000, p. 239).

Yet the dream does not end in this passive lucidity. We have not even been transported to a mode of sleepwalking, but are still motionless. Schopenhauer notes that the “range of the dreamer’s vision is somewhat ex-

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tended so that it goes beyond the bedroom. Thus the curtains or shutters cease to be obstacles to vision and the dreamer then perceives quite distinctly what lies behind them, the yard, the garden, or the street with the houses opposite” (Ibid., pp. 239–240). Coupled with this horizon of limitless place, temporal boundaries surge and recede as old haunts are exposed. Beyond the mind, the doors and rooms of the present fail to prevent the dream-image from taking flight. Suddenly, we are re-experiencing a reconstituted place. In the passing of time, something has remained which, despite its fragmentation, is rendered accessible. Yet the image is precarious, its closure anticipated. Sounds and sights from both realms collide, each prying for the attention of the other. Because of this endangered temporality, consciousness acts swiftly, often entering the half-imagined, half-remembered place before the state is broken. Inside of the old place, the rain from the temporal present intercedes in the image, conferring a familiarity which strengthens the distance we experience in the past. In this ambiguous place, we are beyond boundaries, yet simultaneously dependent on those previous boundaries in order to navigate our way through the fractured terrain. An altered existence emerges, now transported and disembodied. Sheltering in the unreality of the imagined memory, thus we remain for as long as the equilibrium can be preserved. Out of this displacement, we experience time from the inside out. Divested of its exterior order, the line of clean time, divisible and rational, comes undone. In its absence, there is no liberation. Instead, we discover remnants, disused but not dispersed: the old place now stretched beyond its geometrical limitations, cluttered and without the volitional consciousness suppressing it. Of this ambiguous between past and present, Proust remarks: The past still lives in us…has made us what we are and is remaking us every moment! … An hour is not merely an hour! It is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, places, and climates! … So we hold within us a treasure of impressions, clustered in small knots, each with a flavor of its own, formed from our own experiences, that become certain moments of our past (Proust, 1989, p. 231).

This inner sphere of time, which Bergson terns “durée” (duration) is a non-spatial time that contrasts to the dissectible and analytical time found in external objects. Durée, like William James’s “stream of consciousness,” is inner time disinterestedly perceived as an immeasurable Heraclitean river without limits between past, present, and future. Bergson writes, “both the past and the present states form an organic whole, as happens when we recall the notes of a melody, melting, so to speak, into one another” (Bergson, 1910, p. 100). The dualism at the center of Bergson’s philosophy, between

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mind and matter, and habit memory and spontaneous recollection, emerges with a distinction between two modes of temporal moving. In his shorter but no less important essay, “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” we discover a distinction between relative and absolute motion. Outside of the object, movement is relative, whereas the involvement of interior consciousness renders movement absolute (Bergson, 1999, p. 21). The importance of the distinction becomes clear as Bergson aligns the absolute with intuition and the relative with the analytic (Ibid., p. 23). The working of the analytic mind is reductive, just as habit memory informs us of order and structure. Yet the reduction is not without consequence. By that analysis, a translation occurs in which the object is understood symbolically and, anticipating Wittgenstein, in terms of resemblances (Ibid., p. 24). In its purity, time resists such abstraction, together with the arbitrariness of de-compartmentalization. For Bergson, along with Proust, time is not, as positivistism will purport, reducible to a homogenous entity such as space or numbers. Instead, divisible time is a symbolic representation of duration itself. And a symbol, for Bergson, is an artifice used to analyze reality into relative intelligibility. Bergson’s division between the external stratum of divisible time and the inner experience of flux, between the static outer form and the fluid inner duration, echoes the Symbolists’ preoccupation with a dualistic, yet ultimately organic view of the world as sharing in this Heraclitean/Parmenidean division. The Russian poet Andrei Biely observed this duality. Just as Bergson regards duration as the non-spatial flow of “real-time,” so Biely regarded music as a non-causal, inner connection between phenomena (appearance) and the fluid dynamism of life (reality). For Biely, in seeking to penetrate the veil of spatial time, the poet must subvert causality along with the linearity this causality denotes by severing the traditional structure of poetic narrative. This severance, as it would be in Bergson, manifests itself through intuitive introspection, which conceives of metaphysics without “expression, translation, or symbolic representation” (Ibid.). Yet such a conception of metaphysics proves elusive. Despite the poet’s vocation as seer, a natural but necessary confusion exists between external time and internal time. This confusion, Bergson argues, emerges from the necessity of language as a medium between ideas and their distinctions, as Maurice Blanchot writes: “Bergson…while strongly aware of the poet’s powers, continues to be uneasily vigilant when confronted with words, which are in a constant process of crystallization and are weighed down by our intellectual and practical habits” (Blanchot, 1949, p. 64). Blanchot is right: the boundlessness must be bound, the qualitative must become quantitative, and the abstract rendered concrete. This delimitation of time occurs, above all

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else, through language. After the Surrealists, the rigidity of language was contested with automatic writing, a notion borrowed from Freud. For Blanchot, “Spontaneous language is perhaps the language which best explains the formlessness of the interior life, but the language which matters for the artist is that of utmost consciousness…” (Ibid., p. 66). For Bergson, the essentiality of consciousness takes place in seamless duration, in spite of the demand for analytic divisibility: “We reach the self by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to measurement…” (Bergson, 2004, p. 231). Without measurements means without temporal linearity. We are faced with a different kind of consciousness, which begins from the inside, not the outside. Bergson’s self is thus temporally discontinuous: “in reality no one of them begins or ends, but all extend into each other” (Bergson, 1999, p. 25). Because of this overlapping discontinuity, the representation of the past as past becomes impossible. If that were the case, then two temporal memories would lose their identity by being inseparable. Instead, memory takes shape in its distinctness from the present. Thus, duration allows consciousness to counter homogeneity and abstraction. To generalize about “this” particular thought in terms of “concepts [which] can only symbolize a particularly property by making it common to an infinity of things” reduces experience to the category of a homogenous variable and so removes subjectivity from its being (Ibid., p. 29). Intuitive duration, in contrast, reveals lived experience as entrenched in the subjectivity that precedes it.

III Grasped through intuition, duration expresses the core inner-self as a mutable entity that defies the inscription of an exterior abstraction. This “supple, mobile, and almost fluid representation” overcomes the rigorous tendency toward viewing time as solely spatial and instead suggests that memory and time exists in a continuous discontinuity (Ibid., p. 30). Prefiguring Bergson, Seneca once wrote, “All time is in the same place; it all presents the same aspect to us, it lies together. Everything slips into the same abyss” (cited in Dollimore, 1998, p. 26). The intellect, meanwhile, merely comprehends the superficial exterior self, existing as a linear succession of altering states that can be dissected, divided, and decapitated. In abstracting thought from its context, thought becomes, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, a static representation of its true self. In its original form, memory remains unbound. The binding of memory only takes place in hindsight, artificially. Duration experienced in intuition

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discloses the unbinding of memory as the past attains a delicate totality. The disruption of normal consciousness, which we can now term “historic consciousness” in terms of the enforcement of a temporal narrative, is already devalued due to its exclusion of seamless memory. Disruption, which emerges in Proust as the celebrated “involuntary memory,” contests the impression of memory as a “state” open to retrieval. In our phenomenological sketch of semi-consciousness sensing the past, various unconnected objects force the past to expand. We will be required to construct a typology of memorable objects with the aim of ascertaining what binds such objects together. In this way, the connection between the dormant past and the lived experience of historic consciousness will be revealed. So far, we have only considered consciousness as the faculty that enables us to construct a symbolic representation of the world. With our typology of memorable objects, my argument will be that the disruption of memory derives from the imprint of silence upon consciousness, already determined by violence. To this we now turn.

IV When we observe the involuntary memories that shock consciousness into introspection, what is consistent throughout is that they have arisen from the spirit of negation, whereby the disparity between the past and present has severed violently. We can observe how this breaking apart emerges when a memory, originally secured through collective recollection, is subverted as the unity disbands. In this disbanding, an absence is left which defers the memory due to its otherness existing elsewhere. The memory hangs in a sphere of inquietude, unable to find solace in absent reflection, and so obliged to announce itself unexpectedly upon consciousness. Because of this disparity between the encapsulation of memory and the fluidity of time, we speak of consciousness as “haunted.” In the disunity between memory and time, discordance arises linking the natural surge of consciousness and the hibernation of memory. This has the consequence of establishing a divergence involving the desire to progress and the inability to do so. In Bergsonian terms, the severed memory that hungers upon consciousness dissents from the mobility of consciousness, so opposing it. The memory embeds itself in drawn twilight, while consciousness strives in a flow of seamless duration. In short, things “hang” and their resolution evades. Thereafter, the memory no longer pertains to its original context but to a space in which the center once resided. In such a space, consciousness

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mourns itself when memory calls its attention to the part of it that no longer exists. Let us read the following extract by René Char: Wait a while until I come To cleave the cold which holds us Cloud, in your life as threatened as mine (There was a precipice in our house So we left and set up home here). Char, “On the Heights” (1992, p. 97)

Char’s poem encloses and encircles the spatial center by establishing an absence in it. For Char, absence binds space to a sense of being undermined. The hauntological (to borrow a neologism from Derrida) place will be returned to in good time. In my analysis of memory as haunted, we discover the unity of historic consciousness fall from certainty. In its place, an awareness of the fragmented, incomplete, and ruined structure of consciousness materializes. Literature has frequently employed the role of the widow to this effect, as yielding to a memory that can find no release other than in the remembrance of an absent image, a problem inherited from Plato. Consciousness, devoid of its otherness, becomes an artifice existing in a repetitive circle through which the images of the past are re-played ad infinitum, the hope being that unity will be afforded. For the mourner, the dynamic is centered on the irresolution of memory. It is irresolute because that memory becomes a duplicitous idea, evoking the representation of an image yet simultaneously lacking the origin of that representation. How consciousness is able to regard itself as united while undergoing the fallout of memory will be a problem we will confront directly in the following chapter. If mental properties and memories are able to imbue our physical surroundings, examining the manifestation of this centerless absence will clarify to what extent the past determines the present. The phenomenology of involuntary memory resounds with melancholic fascination as we encounter an object that, while still persisting in space and time, is displaced from its native context and so points to an elsewhere that is no longer. Simple occupancy of place disarms spatial boundaries. The peculiarity of the object is that the image of its incipient incarnation is unable to be reconciled in the present tense. The dislocated object stimulates within consciousness a reflection of itself estranged as it confounds temporal categories. Yet the reflection fails to harmonize with the present. While evoking a memory already intimate to consciousness, the object is simultaneously foreign. Reassuring and melancholy concurrently, the object reminds us of a past which existed outside of the recollected past. At the same time, the object affirms the disrup-

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tion of temporal continuity. Encountering the object, we also encounter the scattered ruins of a previous consciousness which once belonged but is now falling from unity. About the ambivalent relationship that consciousness has to the out-ofplace object, in Freud’s account of the “uncanny” we discover an obvious correlation. Whereas the present account of the familiarity of the distant image is rendered possible by an irresolute silence caused through a violent severance between inter-personal consciousness, Freud suggests that the uncanny emerges through the sole repression of the intra-consciousness. With the aim of clarifying the phenomenological structure of the uncanny object, let us review the main points in Freud’s essay on the uncanny. After delimiting the etymological scope of the term “uncanny,” Freud commits himself to a reading of the uncanny which implicates an ambivalent duality between the familiar and the unfamiliar (Freud, 2004, p. 134). Constituting this bind between the familiar and the unfamiliar, understood under the aegis of the uncanny as homely and unhomely, Freud aligns this dialectic around the repression of a hidden thing. Because the object is hidden, it is also feared, thus legitimizing the fictional employment of the uncanny as dreadful. Through a reading of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The SandMan,” Freud makes the clear dynamism of unmasked repression central to the uncanny: “A student named Nathaniel, with whose childhood memories this fantastic tale opens, is unable, for all his present happiness, to banish certain memories connected with the mysterious and terrifying death of his much-loved father” (Ibid., p. 136). Lurking in the background context of Hoffman’s tale is the figure of the Sand-Man: “He is a bad man who comes to children when they won’t go to bed and throws a handful of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their heads, all bleeding” (Ibid.). Freud recounts how the image of the Sand-Man led Nathaniel to discover who and what he is. Evidently, the lawyer Coppelius becomes associated with the Sand-Man, discovers Nathaniel hiding, and attempts to burn out the child’s eyes before Nathaniel’s father prevents him. “A year later,” we learn, “during another visit by the Sand-Man, the father is killed by an explosion in his study, and the lawyer Coppelius disappears from the town without a trace” (Ibid., p. 137). The relationship between vision and anxiety is enforced when Nathaniel rediscovers the figure of the Sand-Man in another guise, that of an Italian optician. After falling in love with an automaton, Nathaniel’s childhood experiences are repeated when the automaton’s eyes are ripped out in a quarrel. The story concludes with the reappearance of Coppelius, whose presence causes Nathaniel to fall into madness.

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Ascribing the violence depicted in the tale to a latent fear of castration, Freud writes: “The study of dreams, phantasies, and myths has taught us that anxiety about one’s eyes, the fear of going blind, is often enough substitute for the dread of being castrated” (Ibid., p. 139). The inextricably bound allegiance between the eye and the “male member,” Freud argues, is central to Hoffman’s story. This position becomes tenable, “as soon as the Sand-Man is replaced by the dreaded father, at whose hands castration is expected” (Ibid.). In formal terms, Freud’s reading of Hoffman recognizes the morphological current of the past as (un)conscious repression causes an altered manifestation to occur. Over a protracted timescale, the experience of trauma instills a disrupted temporal identity in Nathaniel, causing a “compulsion to repeat, which proceeds from instinctual impulses” (Ibid., p. 145). Repeated in “The Sand-Man” is the attempt to reconcile the past with the present. From this possession, repressed thought makes a reappearance. “This species of the frightening,” Freud tells us at a critical juncture, “would then constitute the uncanny…for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Ibid, pp. 147–148). Applying Freud’s theory to the sphere of material objects, we see firstly that the bond between the subject and the object is never entirely divorced, bound by the dormancy of memory, and secondly that even remote associations can bring about uncanny memory by impregnating static objects with a sentient presence. In spite of the temporal closure of the past, the same past reconfigures and reappears, circumventing the attempt to rationalize it into submission. Discussing the persistence of mythic folklore, Freud makes clear the ambiguous attempt to “surmount” the past: Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation. Now, as soon as something happens in our lives that seems to confirm these old, discarded beliefs, we experience a sense of the uncanny (Ibid., p. 154).

Beyond mental contents, forgotten objects can also remerge, despite our belief that they were consigned to oblivion many years ago. When photos are thrown into fireplaces, we are surprised to discover the negatives of those photos still intact many years later. Memory, hitherto assumed annihilated, forces a reprisal against our will. It is easy to overlook the origins of memorable objects as we seek to destroy the past. In the landscape of the disjoined past, where understanding is contested by temporal ambiguity, memory loses its clarity. Instead, the conjunction between objects in the past and the places where they emerge in the present fuses. Because of this disturbed unity, pre-

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sent place and past object conspire to render each other haunted. Simultaneously, the identity of past and present becomes bound. When the present becomes determined by an unexpected encounter, then ridding itself of that determination is only possible if the present reconfigures its structure. In the meantime, unbound memory thrives on such incongruity. Unable to form a clear and distinct connection between the present and the past, the object is reduced to obscurity. The vague possibility of conjunction between two otherwise disparate objects, which in turn dialectally forms the severed object, thus reduces consciousness to a mode of anticipatory uncertainty. This expectation of ambiguity need not lead to a complete rejection of the memory itself. Let us think of Dickens’s Miss Havisham. After being abandoned at the altar, the character attempts to falsify herself as a disillusioned recluse rather than seek escape through abjuration. The manipulation is telling. Her reluctance to separate herself from the point of affliction entails the loss manifesting itself in an embittered and hysterical stagnation: the clocks that are frozen at the hour of abandonment, the natural light that is cast out, and visitors who are denied access or scorned. Consummately, we find her still clothed in the white dress, veil, and bridal flowers from her wedding day: “I know nothing of the days of the week,” she says, “I know nothing of the weeks of the years” (Dickens, 1994, p. 53). Rather than representing a denial of her abandonment, Miss Havisham’s behavior embodies a vacuous freedom forged through the negation of the present replaced by a determined attachment to the past. This act of affirming desertion by denying the continuity of time serves to alleviate loss by rendering the loss a vocation to morbid sympathy. Yet despite placing herself in a presentless time, Miss Havisham is not wholly oblivious to the demise that continues. In progressively accruing distance from the point of departure, the residue of inert time persists. Conversing to Pip about the house, the character reflects: “So new to him… so old to me; so strange to him, so familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us!” (Ibid., p. 54). That a displaced object need be delimited to space and time is thus disproved in Dickens’s tale. In the world of Miss Havisham, the occasional object provides a mnemonic to absence, as does the very objectification of the world which has become a symbol that points to a space that no longer exists.

V In the preceding analysis, consciousness is rooted in a complex arrangement of ambivalent and fragmented memories. We have seen this in how consciousness locates itself with selective reference to the past. A point of phe-

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nomenological intentionality whereby consciousness draws from the object what is reflected in its own subjective contents has been established. Founded in memory, consciousness accrues its memories consciously with volition and unconsciously without. Of these unconscious memories, which Bergson calls involuntary, those that occur without cause are disjoined and so objects of disquiet. Not uniting with the present in a clear and distinct manner, their resolution evades. This irresolute absence is apparent physically through the chance encounter of the past object displaced from its context. This mnemonic throws consciousness into a disjunction between the distant and the familiar, so bringing about profound ambivalence within it involving the comfort assured by the path of history and the melancholy evoked by the loss of the object.

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The Specter of Exile He who travels much has this advantage over others—that the things he remembers soon become remote, so that in a short time they acquire the vague and poetical quality which is only given to other things by time. He who has not traveled at all has this disadvantage—that all his memories are of things present somewhere, since the places with which all his memories are concerned are present. Giacomo Leopardi (2002, p. 60)

I My intention, to spatialize nothingness, has brought us to a point of unity. Due to its omnipotent role, memory unites consciousness by simultaneously severing it. The unification of consciousness has been cast from the imprint that memory has left within it as a historical entity. I am united to the extent that I have a historical narrative that precedes me. This trace of ourselves gained by historic reflection gives rise to a sense of selfhood: “I am the collection of my experiences,” says the essentialist. Yet the historic self, evoked by memory, or the “storehouse of our Ideas,” to use John Locke’s questionable expression, is a perfunctory glimpse into introspective experience (Locke, 1996, p. 83). At best, historic consciousness is justifiable as an artifice used to “linearize” consciousness into temporal symmetry. Because we are able to measure our experience in terms of lived time, a sense of our being at the center of things follows. This we have seen from Bergson. Within this frame of reference, the “I” may be asserted with self-assured belief, so enforcing the presence of selfhood. That this assertion should exhaust the self of its possible interpretations is palpably false. On the contrary, to regard oneself as a divisible entity affixed to points in time (past, present, future) is to render the self an incomplete temporal abstraction. Correlating the exterior aspect to the interior experience, as though to make the self a “thing,” is a tendency usually reserved for orthodox empiricists. We are confronted with a radical dualism. Of those memories and experiences that exist latently, consciousness comes to see itself as duplicitous, that is, as something absent to its immediate self in the present. That this intermittent surge of experience is understood as the essential aspect of consciousness, and not, conversely, the exterior formal aspect, is logical and consistent. Proust writes:

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•THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY• The better part of our memories exists outside us, in a splatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate…outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were. (Proust, 1996, p. 692)

If the involuntary resists volition, then reverie becomes the means by which spontaneous memory is attained. For the most part, we remain hidden to ourselves. Guided by the pretext of reason, we lose our essential nature to the geography of order. Such an ordering of consciousness aspires toward absolute definition. The remains and fragments which materialize when memory confronts consciousness, which is entirely different from consciousness confronting memory, fall by the wayside. The reverie acts otherwise. Without a certain division between cause and effect, temporal categories become ambiguous. With this ambiguity, the power of recollection is affirmed. Bergson writes: To call up the past in the form of an image, we must be able to withdraw ourselves from the action of the moment, we must have the power to value the useless, we must have the will to dream (Bergson, 1950, p. 94).

The reverie intercedes between radical and disjoined temporal and spatial moments. As a result, the resistance against linearity and tempo-centrism means that inner experience takes precedence. Volition evaporates, leaving a space in which a preoccupation with the particular gives way to the landscape of the disrupted absolute. Because consciousness operates between opposing modes of memory and temporal divisions, it finds itself in an impasse whereby it is only able to fully experience itself through the act of recollection. The present falters as experiential immediacy becomes the anticipation of the passing of the present so that it is able to be recollected. We desire to gain experiences and to sequester our sensations into categories if only that they can then be brought to actuality through recollection. And the process? It exists so that we can survey the completion of this task. Already the fulfilled present is a passingthrough of that past. Temporally, the present does not begin. Instead, it gains identity through bating the scattering of memory. In the absence of memory, the present is determined by the exterior mode of divisibility and anticipation. In coming to recognize the historic self as a surrogate self, we view it as being inferior, existing only so that it can pass into memory. Likewise, because time and experience can only be experienced in a past tense, a double bind occurs. As temporal continuity proceeds toward a finite closure, only by

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engaging in that closure can experience be gained. Similarly, as time passes, our losses are measurable, their resonance felt. The desire, melancholy and abject, robs us of the thing we desire in the first place. W.G. Sebald writes correctly: “How wretched this life of ours is!—so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory” (Sebald, 2002 p. 255). In this way, the experience of temporalexperience suffers from delayed recognition. The incongruity of memory is necessary. Objects from the past reappear once we are displaced, spatially and temporally, from the native habitat of those objects. Broadly, the passing of time becomes noticeable the more we are startled by the ruins of memory. In Chapter XI of Schopenhauer’s Parerga and Paralipomena, we discover the ruinous foundation of temporal stability prefigured through a consideration of the “vanity of existence” (Schopenhauer, 2000, p. 282). For Schopenhauer, the constant becoming of existence precludes satisfaction, indeed destroys lasting peace. We are faced with the “vanity of striving [whereby] time is that by virtue whereof at every moment all things in our hands come to naught and thereby lose all true nature” (Ibid.). The annihilation of value coincides with the mutability of material existence. Yet Schopenhauer goes further. The destruction of temporal continuity also destroys the object previously experienced, so that “it as little exists as that which has never been” (Ibid.). As the past outgrows its temporal presence, it becomes irretrievable. The erosion of time means that we occupy an interval in the “meantime.” The interval expands, contracts, but never establishes a whole. Instead, the present gives way and becomes otherwise. Memory too falls into the category of constant becoming. Historic consciousness does its best to retrieve memory. The work is played out externally in the dialectical relationship between history and written memory, where history collects the traces and remnants of testimony and experience. Yet history falters as dormant memory exposes itself to change. The phrase “I remember” is endangered. What is remembered is the memory of the “now” becoming fixed. Often, our memories are comprised from the reproductions, which literally frame the past. Memory is dulled as we rely on the photographic evidence to assure us of the existence of a past. In relying on still life, the particular quality of memory is suppressed. Taking its place, a fabrication of time in which the constant becoming of memory is isolated but not salvaged. While Schopenhauer correlates the ever-vanishing present with “reality,” I have suggested the opposite, namely that the “no longer is” occupies a privileged space of fulfillment, but simultaneously remains inaccessible and exposed to alteration in place and time. For Schopenhauer, “[even] the most

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insignificant present [has power] over the most significant past,” that is, “the advantage of reality” (Ibid.). As I will discuss in Chapter Six, the opposite is the case. The previous chapter has shown how consciousness is hauntologically structured, and how a memory that can no longer find resolution in experience is compelled to draw its own attention to this disquiet. Loss and disquiet are at the origin of involuntary memory. As a void, caught between the guise of the linear self and the surge of the involuntary self, the certainty of a fixed point upon which consciousness can house itself ruptures. The center lacks and hence the house into which consciousness is conceived also lacks. The lack of center renders consciousness a homeless entity, estranged from unity. Proust writes pertinently: “In this world the realm of fantasy or of fiction is the only one worth living in, and the emptiness of human things is so great that, except for Being itself, nothing is beautiful but what does not exist” (Proust, 1989, p. 103). Since consciousness no longer finds itself sheltered by certainty, it becomes determined by the desire for a fixed site, a return to something that is no longer. Let us acknowledge the possibility of this stranded consciousness being denied. As we will discover in the following chapter, faith thrives on the prospect of consolation. Yet the suppression often falters, only to reinforce the original plight. Consider Hegel’s “Unhappy Consciousness,” the first to feel the “painful feeling…that God Himself is dead” (Hegel, 1979, p. 476). Through being conscious of itself as something other than the Universal— that is, as a contingent Particular—the Unhappy Consciousness is roused by a despair which evinces a desire for unification. The Unhappy Consciousness exists only insomuch as a negation of what it desires: “Consciousness of life, of its existence and activity, is only an agonizing over this existence and activity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is only its opposite, is conscious only of its own nothingness” (Ibid., p. 127). Hegel is right. In its mediation, thought tacitly stakes a claim to the home. Even Heidegger concedes: “For a truly joyous and salutary human work to flourish, man must be able to mount from the depth of his home ground up into the ether. Ether here means the free air of the high heavens, the open realm of the spirit” (Heidegger, 1970, p 56). Under the presence of death, this vocation for home is also present. Consider the last rites administered upon the deathbed: are they not conducted to afford resolution to an irresolvable narrative? If piety refuses solace, then defiance will. This concession to the final act of despair is an attribute not exclusive to human beings. The sexton beetle is vivid proof of this. A black and orange beetle, the male spends its nights sniffing out animal carcasses, moving them inch by inch, at times upon its tiny back, at other times pedaling the corpse,

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before finally burying the cadaver in fresh soil. Why? So that when the female sexton arrives, a hole can be pierced into the side of the dead animal, thereby allowing the female to lay her eggs inside the chamber. While they wait for the eggs to hatch, both sextons feed upon the remains of the sterile body. When the eggs eventually hatch, the grubs also share in this partly predigested feast. Like the human considering conversion, the sexton must also find solace in the spectacle of death until death itself has become home. The sexton justifiably makes death its home. Yet it is only able to do this by being devoid of self-consciousness. For the animal, the question of whether home is indeterminate is unasked. A carcass remains just that. Its significance extends to no more than utilitarian and immediate purposes. Whereas for us, symbolic implications of objects are intimately attached to the home and to the non-home. In this symbolic analysis, we ourselves undergo doubt. By coming to recognize the exterior layer of consciousness as a synthetic artifice, the assurance of the home is undermined. In between these two worlds, the fixed self and the nonlinear self, a centerless oscillation which denies consciousness the means to house itself, emerge. Derrida writes thus: “There was no center, that the center could not be in the form of present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of substitutions came into play” (Derrida, 1988, p. 93). Unable to return home without recourse to repression, and so establishing a false home, the home loses conviction. In place of assurance, the desire for home is intensified, not subdued. With the past elsewhere, the ordering of the empirical world proves questionable. If the nonlinear self is a center that no longer exists, the temporality of the world falls from certainty. Let us not trust our senses if they only redeem themselves in the absence of direct experience. With unity demolished, the unfulfilled and unfulfilling desire places consciousness into a state of exile.

II I use the term “exile” cautiously, aware of its potential to be illegitimately aestheticized. The seduction of imagery that entices the “impoverished artist” to actively seek exile as they would inspiration from a solemn landscape must be resisted. In the present context, exile is not a metaphorical notion. Exile is the impasse of existing between an anticipatory and incomplete present and a past, the worth of which is dependent upon its absence. With this resistance, home is negated by the centerless oscillation between appearance, being a facile affect, and reality, a simple absence. In exile, the pre-reflective

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naiveté that consciousness adopted prior to its becoming aware of the exterior self is therefore crushed, so creating a double-consciousness. Selfconsciousness has become its own ruin. The self that is bound to consciousness is such only insofar as it has fled self-consciousness and sought refuge in ignorance. Admitting that the real is the absent, that our lives can only be experienced in the past tense, and that the foundation of home is disrupted by the opposing fluctuation between the desire of the present and the perishing of the past, exile emerges as the grounding mode of consciousness. I have put forward a view of exile as the fundamental dissatisfaction with existing outside of the self in a struggle between the desired but absent past and the perishing but partial present. When the mode of wavering withdraws from articulation, spatial disembodiment is the manifestation. This central point discloses the interplay between space and time. When we are secure or unaware of frailty, the body confirms the solidity of being. Existing on the surface, not wavering beneath the temporal façade, the body appears as essential to the self. The certainty of being-in-oneself is undermined, however, as a sense of displacement collides with a sense of never being present to oneself. Unable to grasp existence in its most concrete form—that of being present in a fixed location—embodiment is subverted by the disloyalty between time and place. Like an extraneous object, no longer tractable, the body hangs in suspended time. Yet as a biophysical entity, consciousness endures. This refusal to grant the body its identity is disproved by the presence of the mirror. In the conjunction between mental temporality and physical spatiality, familiar and unfamiliar worlds encounter one another. Unlike external objects, the growth and decay of the body takes place in an intimate fashion. The mutability of the body is not something we can claim to be autonomous from. As it flees into the elsewhere, the body reminds us of our distance from the original center. We are not the same as we were. But is the sameness of type measurable in terms of memory or physical duration? The problem, once raised by John Locke, will reappear in subsequent chapters. In outlining the phenomenology of the schizophrenic, the once celebrated (anti)psychiatrist R.D. Laing presents an account of the disembodied self, whereby the dissociation between mind and body is so distant so to be utterly disparate. Laing writes with characteristic lucidity: In this position the individual experiences his self as being or more less divorced from his body. The body is felt more as one object among other objects in the world than as the core of the individuals own being. Instead of being the core of his true self, the body is felt as the core of a false self, which a detached, disembodied, ‘inner,’ ‘true’ self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be (Laing, 1965, p. 69).

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This voyeuristic position frames the diversion between the outward inertia of the lower body and the temporal discontinuity of the exiled consciousness. As a consequence of the divergence, a division occurs between mind and body, but so too between a set of identities. A dichotomy linking the self who exists in the impartial present and the self who exists as a retriever of the perfected past, both of whom remain in exile from each other, is the eventual outcome. In her autobiographical essay “The New Nomads,” Eva Hoffman writes: “For to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute—it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seemingly natural aspects of our identities and social reality are constructed rather than given and that they could be shaped, articulated in quite another way” (Hoffmann, 1997, p. 45). The duality of a singular entity, together with the disembodiment that follows on from this unnatural fracture, is again illustrated in the music of Giya Kancheli. In Kancheli’s recent orchestral piece “à la Duduki” (1995), volatile disunity between two polarities creates a tension against which the dynamic between the home and the non-home is played out. This is manifest primarily in agitated neo-Baroque melodies, which struggle against full orchestral outbursts. Episodic dynamic stasis is used to establish a native context, only broken some twelve minutes into the piece when an extended wind cantilena evokes a displaced East-Asian motif. Because the deliberately foreign tone invites disjunction, we experience a sense of disparity between two ostensibly distinct worlds that are nevertheless united through their persistence in space and time. Memory is stranded in the elsewhere, yet retains a grip on the movement of the present. For this reason, Kancheli’s “à la Duduki” is determined by a tension which delivers itself from resolution. Indeed, the memory of the past, blocked by the double-consciousness of exile, only comes alive by dint of disjoining with the present. Let us join Kancheli as the trumpet passage marks the moment of uncanny recognition between past and present. During this lyrical phase, the present manages to catch sight of the past, so slows down to anticipate its passing. We are in the region of a sparse landscape. Suddenly the horizon of the landscape expands, revealing the tonality of smooth space. Reverie and the lucidity of memory coincide as the impression of spaciousness testifies to the distance traveled between the past and the present. Yet the landscape of the clear past does not last. With the unleashing of the full orchestra, something pierces the meditative mood, instigating a radical collision of temporal continuity. We return to the present. Only now, it is a present defined by what has been destroyed or altered.

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In Kancheli, we observe how the dual consciousness of exile is compounded between a disunity of presence and absence, so fracturing any linear consideration of time. This alteration of the temporal mode is central to Kancheli’s music. Alfred Schnittke, himself a genius of dislocation, writes fluently: In Giya Kancheli’s symphonies, it is as though in a comparatively short time (twenty to thirty minutes of slow music) we experience an entire life or an entire history. But we have no sense of the jolts of time, we seem to be in an aircraft, not conscious of speed, soaring over musical space—that is, over time….now there is broken and gasping breathing, now concentrated meditation, now an unexpected spasm, now a tragic funeral procession, now blows struck by an unknown evil, now a lyrical revelation, now frenzied violence, now the proud stoicism of humility—all this passes before us in sequence, and we do not know when and where these events, separated by centuries, took place. (Schnittke, 2002, p. 68).

With compressed time, nomadism creates the impression of movement. Yet it is a misleading impression, since the movement is always with reference to what preceded and so determined it. The exiled know this. This is why dwelling in place is precluded. Already, space and place are outside of themselves. As something foreign and familiar, former certainties disband as loss becomes determinate. As time renders the distance between consciousness and home greater, the spatial expanse prevents a correspondence with that home. For this reason, suggests Mary McCarthy, exiles “are also great readers of newspapers and collectors of clippings. The fact that the press of their country is censored (a corollary, evidently, of their exile) makes them more hungry for scraps of rumor and information which they can then piece together” (cited in Robinson, 1996, p. 50). The censoring of information and the fragmented nature of its emergence mirrors the structure of memory. Volitional consciousness, a censor of the unconsciousness, to echo Freud, disallows a direct correspondence with the past. Instead, the remnants of memory seep in between the order and regularity of consciousness, allowing the exiled a momentary space in which the remains can be collected. As volitional consciousness beckons to re-emerge, however, silence and estrangement make a forceful return. The volatile wavering between absence and presence is accompanied by the anticipation of a further loss in the future. Coupled with this uncertainty, an awareness of the precarious nature of materiality thus ensues. In his Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception Attitudes and Values, Yi-Fu Tuan describes topophilia as the condition of ascribing symbolic value to inert substances: “Beyond clothing” he writes, “a person invests bits of his emotional life in his home, and beyond his home in his neighborhood. To be forcibly evicted from one’s home and neighborhood

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is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human being from the bewilderments of the outside world” (Tuan, 1974, p. 99). In exile, place-attachment intensifies as centrality and spatial enclosure undergo doubt.

III As a result of a loss of temporal security, continuity disbands as the “reality” of memory undergoes a loss of certainty. The further we stray from our home, the greater our disbelief that such a home ever existed. Apparitions, traces, and vague allusions to a past haunt us to suggest that such images were the product of an isolated mind. In dreams, we encounter the certainty of home. Upon awaking, confusion is confounded by the intimacy into which the dream reaches. “It takes one awful second, I often think,” writes W.G. Sebald, “and an entire epoch passes away” (Sebald, 2002, p. 31). Denying us immediate access to the past, a thwarted desire unfolds. Thereafter, remembrance takes the place of experience, tempered only by a faithful wait for unity. McCarthy writes: This condition of waiting means that the exile’s whole being is concentrated on land he left behind, in memories and hopes. The more passive type, summed up in the banished poet, lives on memories, while the active type, summoned up in the revolutionist, lives on hopes and schemes. There is something of both in every exile, an oscillation between melancholy and euphoria (cited in Robinson, 1996, p. 49).

Immense distance falls in between the various places of memory, spatial or mental, we once inhabited. Impossible thereafter is the thought of unity within a continuous identity. That to persist in time, experience must be acquired without it falling prey to estrangement is a vocation ruined. The exposure of unreal memory, made evident in the duration of time, denies us absolute unity. Instead, unfiltered absence exists in the home that suddenly glides into an impenetrable temporal abyss, realized only after that home has been destroyed. “And the entire reality of memory becomes spectral,” recognizes Gaston Bachelard with devastating clarity (Bachelard, 1994, p. 58). We will now examine the extent to which this specter of exile informs the permanent structure of our consciousness.

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Dark Night of the Soul The first few instants of sleep are the image of death; a drowsy numbness steals over our thoughts, and it becomes impossible to determine the precise point at which the self, in some other form, continues to carry on the work of existence. Gerard de Nerval (1999, p. 265)

I The mode of consciousness I have described thus far, whereby we exist in an irresolute impasse between the past and the present, desiring the present to perish so that it can become the past, without a fixed center with which we can house ourselves, merits the term “exile.” This exile, characterized by being-in-time yet never wholly being-as-such, has its archetypal form. As Heidegger has rightly said, “not being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 177). By way of explicating this ontology of exile, let us recall the form into which exile was originally cast: the Fall. Christianity tells us that when Adam transgressed, so too did humanity, and when Adam was banished from Eden, so too was humankind. Let us now retell this fable in more detail, lest the dogmas of faith have distorted its original worth. Let us first consider Adam, the primordial man: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis, 2:7). Medieval alchemy will tell us that this dust, or mortal clay, is synonymous to the four corruptible elements, implying that Adam’s soul was already immersed in the dross that would later render him mortal. Paracelsus goes further to suggest that the prima materia is Adam himself (terra Adamica) and that within Adam lies the bodily clay through which Eve is created, thereby rendering Adam the mercurial hermaphrodite, understood in Gnosticism as “syzygy.” The suggestion that Adam is inextricably bound to the prima materia is not a new one. If it had yet to be suggested in Genesis itself, then Zosimos of Panopolis, the founder of Hellenistic alchemy (third century AD), made it explicit. About the very name itself, Zosimos suggests that it means “blood red earth,” a reference to the color of the lapis. Having been conceived in isolation, Adam is united with his companion: “And the Lord God said, it is not good that the man should be alone; I will

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make a help mate for him” (Genesis, 2:18). Eve marks the beginning of unity. Yet to understand Eve without consideration of her predecessor Lilith would be impartial. In Hebrew, Lilith is translated as “night,” in Sumerian as “night-hag,” and she is described in Isaiah as the screech owl of the desert. This, it has been suggested (Farrar and Farrar, 1996, p. 56), is Lilith’s original name: “The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest” (Isaiah, 34:14). The depiction of Lilith as a banished owl is particularly apt. According to the Talmud, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, forged through him with sediment and dust. After refusing to submit to Adam’s desires, Lilith fled the Garden of Eden, sought out Yahweh (God), and thereafter deceived him into giving her his secret name, being Tetragrammaton. Having acquired power over Yahweh, Lilith demanded that he bestow wings upon her so that she would be able to fly to the desert. Adam, meanwhile, sent the three angels (Senoi, Sansenoi, and Samangloph) to find Lilith and bring her back to him. On the banks of the Red Sea, they found Lilith copulating with demons. Determined not to leave her perch, Lilith remained. Only after Lilith’s declaration of obstinacy was Adam given a new, submissive wife: Eve. Despite Adam remaining celibate to Eve, Lilith sought revenge upon Adam by visiting him each night as a succubus, capturing his semen, and thus conceiving fiendish offspring. While Lilith was in exile, God was able to create Eve from Adam’s rib. In the Garden of Eden, Adam was given the freedom to eat from any of the trees with the exception of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Genesis, 2:17). When Lucifer entered the Garden and tempted Eve with Forbidden Fruit, she took it, believing that knowledge would be conferred on her and not death. The conjunction of sensual and intellectual pleasure reveals Eve’s striving for absolute knowledge. This knowledge of the whole gives rise to self-consciousness: “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” (Genesis, 3:7). In eating the fruit, the human being was able to distinguish between good and evil. What is sinful about the Fall, then, is the negation of moral dependency upon God, which hitherto was regarded as a communion between human beings and God. Having tasted the forbidden fruit, Adam was thereby wrenched from the grasp of God. After falling from God’s presence, Adam’s shadow is cast over humanity as a symbol of banishment and impiety. Recalling this decline, Robert Burton

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writes: “this noble creature…is fallen from that he was, and fortified his estate, become a wretched manikin, a castaway, a caitiff, one of the most miserable creatures of the world, an unregenerate man, and so much obscured by his Fall he is inferior to a beast” (Burton, 1927, p. 113). Thus, the Fall was as much a fall to the world of duality as it was a fall from the paradise of unity. In envisioning self-consciousness, humanity creates a view of itself as something different from that of its otherness. The Garden is seen as an elsewhere, humanity is distinct from divinity, and particular life, embodied and temporal, is opposed to eternity. What emerges from this banishment is a disruption of the undifferentiated. Accordingly, human beings are thrust into the spatialtemporal and there experience the basic polarities between being and becoming. This distinction between self and other, between here and elsewhere, and between reconciliation and rage, gives rise, then, to the first exile. For Christianity, the Fall was justified as a necessary part of humanity’s redemption: “Were it not for our transgression we never should have had seed, and never should have known good and evil, and the joy of our redemption, and the eternal life which God giveth unto all the obedient” (Moses, 5:11). By embodying the figure of redemption, we see how Christ became a prophet for the homeless, and thus synonymous with home. We only need consult the Scriptures to have this equation confirmed. Consider the wilderness of Jeremiah (2:2), or the “barren and howling waste” of Deuteronomy (32:10). Only through the existence of the wilderness does redemption become possible. From the Christian perspective, exile necessitates resolution. Already home is established in the moment of displacement. Isaiah (40 to 55) proclaims that the Word of God will bring about this homecoming: “To open the blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house” (42:7). The implication is that homecoming denotes collective redemption, not a specific hegemonic principle. This renunciation of hegemony in place of an inversion of history consummates itself in the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament through the figure of Christ. The displacement of home in place of discipleship was the first stage in the inversion of history that deemed Christ the home-bearer. We no longer needed a home. Instead, faith was conceived. Having been exiled from Eden, and so reduced to spiritual and physical homelessness, the human being turns to Christ for redemption. Redemption is only made possible through the presupposition that what divided humanity from God was humanity’s mortality and not the acquisition of reason, previously stolen from the Tree of Knowledge: “And now, behold, if Adam had not transgressed he would not have fallen, but he would have remained in the

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garden of Eden. And all things which were created must have remained in the same state in which they were after they were created; and they must have remained forever, and had no end” (2 Nephi 2:22). In taking the fruits from the Tree of Knowledge, death was implicated. The advent of death was hence the consequence of consciousness becoming rational. Reason gave rise to self-consciousness. As a result, this allowed human beings to see their mortality reflected in the image of others. In acquiring reason, the human being turned its consciousness upon God, and so held itself and God in question. Knowing that self-consciousness was a consequence of the Fall, the human exists with disquiet: “From the time of Adam until now,” writes Nietzsche, “man has been in an abnormal state: God himself has sacrificed his son for the guilt of Adam, in order to put an end to this abnormal state….Christ gives back the state of normality to him who believes in him: he makes him happy, idle and innocent” (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 130). What is sought in Christian redemption is the redemption from reason to the refuge of faith.

II As we have seen, Christianity substituted faith for homelessness. The sense of impotence that characterized homeless exile was thus suspended by the presence of God. In turn, silence became sound. We can see this substitution as representing the logical reaction to the deserted void. Yet in concealing the implications of exile from consciousness, Christianity, while redeeming the human from desolation, simultaneously denies the space in which clarity might arise. Beneath this redemptive emphasis, an analysis of self-conscious exile remains incomplete. Accordingly, our attention is now drawn to this displacement, framed by the absence of God. Unlike Nietzsche’s death of God, the absence does not entail moral freedom, but the presence of silence. Phenomenologically, we are able to observe the passing of deserted movement on a compressed scale. Insomniacs who exist beyond their time acquire this metaphysical silence by being hypersensitive to stillness. Nomads too, in removing themselves from the position of any locus standi, are able to see the world as a phenomenon without an audience. Acquiring distance from phenomena allows sound to resound. We turn our backs on the world and in the process discover how far the sound travels. In the same way, godlessness coincides with the presence of silence. The loss of mythology instigates a new place, determined by the failed logic of a previous configuration. And yet we are still able, if mournfully, to summon the impression of enclosure. Rooms and corridors mark the passage of sound. But the question

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of degree is important. We remain in the simulated place of pure presence. What is unable to exceed the world limits itself to a finite set of conditions. Silence, however, is able to overrule the particular through rendering the particular negative in the same way that an absent room becomes determined by the rule of silence which subverts the former presence. This metaphysical declaration of silence, having arisen from the shadow of absence, has its precursors. Let us turn to Psalm 42. Mourning the loss of his temple in Jerusalem, we encounter an exiled psalmist living in the far north near Mount Mizar. Because it was aligned with God’s presence, the temple and home, spirit and place, were united. That it was destroyed meant that the home only survived in recollection: “These things I remember as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival” (Psalms, 42:4). Later, we find the psalmist yearning: “I will say unto God my rock, why hast thou forgotten me? Why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?” (Psalms, 42:9). Despite the unfamiliarity of the land, the psalmist seeks consolation from the trace of Jordan, visible from Mount Mizar. Mournful loss has become a nostalgic reverie. With nostalgia arises the hope that the ruined home might be restored: “Hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance” (Psalms, 42:11). In Psalm 77, this absence is enunciated through a direct supplication to God: “I cried unto God with my voice, even unto God with my voice…in the day of my trouble I sought the Lord: my sore ran in the night, and ceased not: my soul refused to be comforted. I remembered God and was troubled: I complained and my spirit was overwhelmed” (Psalms, 77:1–4). Weary of his sorrow, the psalmist raises his fist to God, demanding a response: “Will the Lord cast off for ever? And will he be favorable no more? Is his mercy clean gone forever? Doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies?” (Psalms, 77:7–10). From a God whose voice is miscarried, the psalmist hears no retort, so draws upon the memory of God’s words for consolation. As a substitute for God’s absence, the psalmist’s recollection enables him to cast God’s presence over the land, and in turn, nature and place, pantheistically identified with the deity, become spiritual entities.

III In his Dark Night of the Soul, the Spanish mystic and poet St. John of the Cross echoes the psalmist’s experience of an absent God as despair and mis-

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ery while purporting that despair itself, as it would be for Hegel’s dialectic, is a necessary path to redemption. For St. John, what is especially arduous about the dark night is our passivity in relation to God’s absence: That which this anguished soul feels most deeply is the conviction that God has abandoned it, of which it has no doubt; that He has cast it away into darkness as an abominable thing…the shadows of death and the pains and torments of hell are most acutely felt, and this comes from the sense of being abandoned by God (St. John of the Cross, 1916, p. 56)

Devoid of God’s presence, and so cast into spiritual exile, the plane of existence presents itself as a death. Inert and stillborn, the transcendental spark has been extinguished. Yet to be absent from God is to have known God in the first instance. So pure is the knowledge that the mystic’s deprivation is heightened by his antithetical state: “The soul is conscious of a profound emptiness in itself, a cruel destitution of the kinds of goods, natural, temporal, and spiritual, which are ordained for its comforts. It sees itself in the midst of the opposite evil, miserable imperfections, dryness and emptiness of the understanding, and abandonment of the spirit in darkness.” (Ibid., p. 43). God stands with ambivalence to the mystic, as both divine and wretched: divine when present, wretched when absent. This oscillation experienced through God’s absence is considered by the mystic to be constitutive of the final purgation of the will, so that it may merge “in God where it was first.” As with Schopenhauer, exile is closed through self-dissolution, whereby the mystical self exists only insofar as it is submissive to God. To this extent, St John of the Cross justifies rather than explicates God’s absence by positing it as a means to an end and not an end itself. Understood by the mystics, the exile caused by God’s absence purges the self of its childish tendency for spiritual gluttony, which inhibits the soul’s capacity for submission unto God. That this submission conceals a desire for the displaced Eden is manifest from the yearning for a conversion from multiplicity to unity, from differentiated disorder to undifferentiated order, and from becoming to Being. The logic is evident: what it is to establish the contrast between self and other, presence and absence, and being and nothingness if the self is absent? So that the solace of the forsaken home was shown to be a process of negation illuminated by the absence of God, I have sought recourse to St. John and the Psalms. Yet the purgative aspects of both the Psalms and St. John rendered their confrontation with exile a utilitarian, prescriptive, and therefore partial one. How are we to approach the structure of exile if it is framed as a means and not an end? This partiality has arisen from the tacit assump-

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tion that beyond displacement a unity awaits, and that through adapting to displacement, the establishment of home is possible. Consequently, due to the exteriority of this home being manifest as a God, we have yet to consider exile as something devoid of a resolute home, precluding the possibility of redemption through faith, and thus as something boundless. Boundless exile, however, being devoid of a definite conception and simultaneously lacking a certain end, is the determining influence upon consciousness. Through being thrown into exile, inwardly as something non-spherical, outwardly as something reflected in a non-spherical world, consciousness desires a fixed spatial-temporal point, home. Home for the exiled consciousness no longer exists. We will freely submit to this, yet maintain homesickness. How is this so? This impossible homesickness is the condition of nostalgia. At the center of this impossible logic, the persistence of the home, remembered or imagined, is fundamental. “Philosophy,” Novalis once wrote, “is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere” (cited in Heidegger, 2001, p. 5). Philosophy disrupts the already disrupted unity by making clear the blocked pathway between originary existence and fallen existence. We have seen how the psalmists and St. John are able to put exile in place through faith. Faithful exile, however, has negated the magnitude of exile, being the discontinuous identity of time and place, divested of redemption. In the following chapter, I will bind exile with nostalgia by examining the temporal disequilibrium of remembered place.

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An Impossible Nostalgia So many memories that loom up without apparent necessity—of what use are they, except to show us that with age we are becoming external to our own life, that these remote ‘events’ no longer have anything to do with us, and that one day the same will be true of this life itself? E.M. Cioran (1992, p. 200)

I One of the curious failures in medical history is that the term “nostalgia” originally implied a solely physical condition, defined in terms of spatial geometry. Deriving from the Greek nostos, “to return home,” and algos, “pain,” the word was coined by a seventeenth century Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer. In his dissertation referring to Swiss mercenaries relocated from their homes, Hofer described nostalgia as homesickness to the point of pathology. He writes of, “a continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibers of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of the idea of the Fatherland still cling” (Hofer, 1934, p. 45). So overpowering was the nostalgia that Swiss soldiers were advised to avoid the sound of cowbells and alpine melodies, lest they were reminded of their home. To the purely spatiophysical diagnosis of nostalgia, the antidote of homecoming, even the promise of it, was entirely plausible. Hence, when another German-Swiss physician, J.J. Scheuchzer, declared nostalgia a disease of atmospheric pressure “causing excessive body pressurization, which in turn drove blood from the ear to the brain, thereby producing the observed affliction of sentiment” (cited in Davis, 1979, p. 2), the prognosis was not in question. Absent from the home, medication would include leeches, purges, emetics, and bloodletting. By the early eighteenth century, nostalgic terror had grown to such an extent that a Russian general resorted to burying his soldiers alive for three days to restrain their sickly cravings. As the romantic taste for subjective reflection supplanted the austere and supposedly objective order of reason in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, nostalgia changed its form. Instead of being seen as exterior to the self, it became internalized as something inherent to the self. With the advent of Freudian psychoanalysis, nostalgia became synonymous

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with regression. Thereafter, the desire for home was to be seen as tantamount to a desire for parental supervision. Despite rejecting the medical diagnosis of nostalgia in favor of a psychodynamic model, the twentieth century would continue to maintain the pejorative quality of nostalgia as “sickly.” After the Second World War, the diagnosis of nostalgia as pathological homesickness remedied by a future homecoming was at best romantic speculation, at worst an echo of nationalism. Any such aspiration to a home fixed under the guise of permanency was viewed as a maudlin affectation. Heidegger was attentive to this post-war displacement, yet such was the peculiarity of his character that his thoughts on homelessness are to be viewed with reservation. Germany’s rupture after the war, in its physical and mental landscape, was immense. Despite this, Heidegger’s reaction to the suffering was regressive. While the possibility of cosmopolitanism was embraced, Heidegger was concerned with the reunification of Germany as the Heimat, remarking that “according to our human experience and history, everything essential and of great magnitude has arisen only out of the fact that man had a home and was rooted in tradition” (Heidegger, 1981, p. 57). Heidegger’s musings on homelessness persistently reference the geometric-spatial field, and so revert to the pre-reflective diagnosis of nostalgia as geographical displacement, and that alone. His failure to grasp homesickness in temporal terms is especially striking given the attention time receives in Being and Time. The omission is further heightened, since temporality is at the structural core of nostalgia. Let us not forget that before Heidegger, Kant had already established the temporal dimension of nostalgia as central. Discussing the power of imagination, Kant’s analysis of Swiss nostalgia makes clear the role that time has in determining the affect of place: “The homesickness of the Swiss…is the result of a longing that is aroused by the recollection of a carefree life and neighborly company in their youth, a longing for places where they enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life” (Kant, 1978, p. 69). We are confronted with a remembered place structured temporally. The native place comes to act as an enclosure in which temporal events occur. Because of this primitive temporality, place remains in flux, unable to seize the past in the present. Thus, a temporal loss, unlike a spatial loss, can never be returned to nor regained. Describing the return to remembered place, Kant observes how the Swiss, “think that everything has drastically changed, but it is that they cannot bring back their youth” (Ibid.). In between place and the wilderness, we lose sight of the temporal interval which intercedes. Kant’s alignment between lost youth and the return to old place realizes the status that place has in marking the absence of time. And yet within the mode of nostalgia, consciousness

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comes to affix itself toward that absent time-place. I propose that we now observe how this desire instills a place of estrangement and unreality by phenomenologically considering childhood spatiality. The impossibility of nostalgia predicates itself on the desire for the absent. In the return to remembered place, space and time disunite, causing temporal categories to unbind. In the homecoming, such a disparity between space and time exceeds anticipation and so undermines the reality of the past. For Bachelard, “clear memories of our childhood [can] appear to be detached from us” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 57). As a result of a “dateless past,” this dissociation causes us to “doubt that we ever lived where we lived” (Ibid., pp. 56– 7). With the past “elsewhere,” this is an unsettling moment for Bachelard, which means that “time and place are impregnated with a sense of unreality...we ask ourselves if what has been, was. Have facts really the value that memory gives them?” (Ibid., p. 58). If memories reach a point where their clarity and reality give way to unfamiliarity and detachment, then past and present evade reconciliation by dint of this void. What emerges in this void is a fragmentation of personal identity and of our experience of space and place. If lived places contain memory, then by returning to them, the likely result is estrangement and not affirmation. As the reality of the original memory becomes an object external to us, so the spectral quality of past experience becomes lucid. This realization that space and place fall from certainty coincides with the experience of nostalgia. If the past can become unfamiliar, detached, and unreal, this presupposes that an image of the past was already established in which the familiar was fixed. When our encounter with old places is met with estrangement and emptiness, then the fixed familiar has been disproved. The disproving is explicit: an image of the past that is abstract necessarily neglects the movement of that place in the present. When we leave our homes, our memory ceases with that departure. Only the imagination can reconstruct the decline and growth that occur in our absence. But this invariably falters when the imagination calls upon an already lived past to reconstruct an indeterminate present. When we return, a collision between past and present invokes an uncertainty in memory. Place refuses to be placed and so becomes overwhelmingly uncanny. In Marc Augé’s description of childhood memories, we find, “vanished landscapes or faces we sometimes find again in our dreams as well, incongruous details, surprising in their significance” (Augé, 2004, p. 21). In the return, this “vanished landscape” is invoked for the reason that the form of place persists while the remaining content simultaneously expires. As clarity beckons to disband, the old house undergoes a loss of intimacy until it is reduced to a purely geometrical space, deprived of its

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once vivid core. Thus, while Cicero acknowledges that, “when we return to a place after a considerable absence, we not merely recognize the place itself, but remember things that we did there,” he fails to mention that those very places, actions, and “unuttered thoughts” simultaneously become foreign by dint of having once being homely (Yates, 1966, p. 37). The dynamic of past and present gradually becoming disunited is central to nostalgia, since the attraction of nostalgia structurally depends on an image of the past that is fixed in the present. The desire to return to a place is caused by the desire to return to the same place that we remember. For that continuity to unfold, time and place need to converge. Yet as Edward Casey notes in his penetrating essay on nostalgia, it is not only a return to a particular locality that is at stake, but rather “the way that this particularity bears up a lost world and exhibits it to our poignantly needful apprehension in the present” (Casey, 1987, p. 364). Were there not a distinction between what was present and what was absent, the magnetism of nostalgia would inevitably dissolve. Continuity would be a given and the place of pastness would no longer be required. Yet the “lost world” of nostalgia is discontinuous and untimely insofar as the object of nostalgia must necessarily fall away from time in order to be preserved as the static past. Through this falling, we discover that the uncanniness of returning to old places is framed by an enforcement of a past which has outlived itself. As nostalgia submits to its desires by invoking a return homewards, so it discloses the void between past and present in spatial terms. With this acquiescence to desire intact, Bachelard’s claim that the past detaches itself from the present might be understood with greater clarity. The doubt and unreality that “impregnate…time and place” justify their presence through the insistence that the past ought to be rigid if not wholly unalterable. Intuition demands that mental memories align (and so reconcile) with spatial memories. When this unity is destabilized, the remembered reality of the past does indeed undergo a loss of reality in that our past is annihilated, and so rendered unreal, while a foreign present is forged. “It as though,” writes Bachelard, “we sojourned in a limbo of being” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 58). Since it is “physically inscribed in us” (Ibid., p. 14), in the case of the childhood house, this limbo is particularly pronounced. In a passage by Rilke, which Bachelard cites, the remembered childhood house is said to be “conserved in me in fragmentary form” (Ibid., p. 57). For Rilke, outright spatial clarity is undermined as memory becomes unbound. The imagined return to the old house is met, not with temporal continuity, but with an inverted image, the boundaries of which spill into each other: “Indeed, as I see it now…it is not a building, but is quite dissolved and dis-

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tributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corridor…thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me” (Ibid., p. 57). The scattering of space coincides with the dissociation of memory, and so enforces the sense that the past is gradually becoming externalized to the present as an estranged entity. “Nostalgia takes the shape of a maze composed of many visible and invisible cities, including the native one,” writes Svetlana Boym accurately (Boym, 2001, p. 288). As origins are substantiated with the imagination, the labyrinthine quality of nostalgia, instead of drawing us toward the past, eludes us in an unbuilt and entirely ambiguous past. Rilke’s mediation confirms this ambiguity, and thus urges us to consider the role played by archetypal place in vouchsafing personal identity. If the definitive experience of intimate place means that the relationship between, in Aristotelian terms, container and contained, is pre-supposed to be absolute, conflict is inevitable, given that space and place manifestly open themselves up to an absence of necessity. For Bruce Janz, the transition from site to place and then back again is entirely consistent with the instability of place: “While we often think of place in terms of stability or rootedness, we also must recognize that this stability is actually a useful fiction. Places are not only spatially particular but to some extent temporally particular as well” (www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/janz.html, 2004). Posing this instability against the question of personal identity in time, divergence ensues when it is realized that archetypal place exceeds its universality as particular experience, so causing Bachelard’s “fossilized duration” to lose its retentive quality. Since archetypal place encourages attachment, despite the structural validity of the original archetype, memories are more liable to be “domesticated” and so oblivious to the space outside of this supposed certainty.

II So long as spatial proximity and temporal distance persist simultaneously, nostalgia will remain a disarming paradox that entails a disrupted unreality and not temporal continuity. The implications of this are that place does not determine our sense of time, but that time confers a specific quality upon place. Hence, the logic of nostalgia depends on the mind positing the object in the first instance. In return, consciousness is intentional in its desires. Even when the object of nostalgia is of ruin, dissolution, or suffering, as indeed the French term “nostalgie de la boue” (lit. “yearning for mud”) suggests, its appeal is still enticing, knowing that any such contact with the object is impossible. A sense of attraction emerges, whereby a sufficient distance is acquired from the object, rendering it an aesthetic object: “For beauty is nothing but

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the beginning of terror,” writes Rilke correctly, “which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us” (Rilke, 1987, p. 151). Looking back upon the past with melancholy pleasure, knowing that any return is impossible, induces happiness but also gloom. Nostalgie de la boue suggests that even a past marked by dissension and discomfort is preferable to a present the appeal of which is its passing. The question remains: despite the inherently specious foundation of nostalgia, how does consciousness maintain a fixed image of the past, especially when that image of the past is disproved by returning to it? One answer is suggested in the unattainability of the nostalgic object. When Oscar Wilde quips, “the charm of the past is that it is the past,” what has been identified is an evasion of temporal contingency (Wilde, 1930, p. 153). Temporality is exclusive, its return impossible. Because of this, a static image of history becomes impervious to external questioning. Knowing that the embodiment of history is inherently incomplete, an ideal is established which makes a claim to an elsewhere. Already plans are made when the return to remembered place fails to align with the memory of that place. Instead of conceding to the mutability of place, the nostalgic shifts the ideal so that its location remains hidden but not annihilated. In this way, memory refuses to exhaust itself of desire. What lacks in the incomplete present is compensated by the absent past. In compensating for disenchantment, nostalgia discloses its mournful character.

III If the past is unattainable, no more than an abstraction affixed to the interior of the lecture theater alone, are we apposite to describe it as redundant? Intuition suggests otherwise. Endemically, the past is tinged with value and celebration. Delighted by relics, preoccupied with origins, and appeased by kitsch, the past imbues the present and also forms it. “Only a good-fornothing,” writes Freud, “is not interested in his past” (Freud, 1951, p. 76). Why is this eulogy and influence so pervasive? As we have seen from Bergson, memory is essential to the formation of the present. Recourse to the past means that we have greater familiarity with the present and orientation within that present. Hannah Arendt once wrote, “the reality and reliability of the human world rest primarily on the fact that we are surrounded by things more permanent than the activity by which they were produced” (Arendt, 1958, pp. 195–196). In relying upon the past for our familiarity with the present, the values of tradition emerge. Reminding ourselves of the transgressions and virtues of

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history, we are led to believe that we can avoid or improve our unfolding narrative. Tradition relies upon a preservation of the past as well as a restoration of “lost” value. We value the past, but from the vantage point of a supposedly progressive present. Since it is fundamentally rooted in improvement, preservation converts an unrefined value into a pristine and progressive one. In the words of Nietzsche, “The trivial, circumscribed, decaying, and obsolete acquire their own dignity and inviolability through the fact that the preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian man has emigrated into them and there made its home” (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 73). Collectivity and individually, history has been elemental in the construction of identity. John Locke’s theory of personal identity has proved its appeal by positing an autonomous subject which need only recall its past to ascertain its identity. This criterion has not been without its opponents. Both Butler and Reid famously objected to Locke’s account of personal identity, arguing that he confounded consciousness with memory, so rendering the argument circular, the implication being that memory presupposes the concept of personal identity. In spatial terms, the centrality of the past is evident in the monument. That a monument is able to convey past events spatially relies on the supposition that memories are able to be preserved through representation. What does it mean to say that memories are preserved through representation? Traditionally, theorists arguing for a representative account of memory have placed emphasis on the image of the past existing in the present (cf. Sutton, 1998). This image is possible because memory presupposes a “trace,” stored until retrieval. Thus, memory of the past is caused by present remembering which relies upon the notion that traces guarantee a bond between past and present. Correlating memory traces with spatial metaphors is unavoidable and logical. As children, we carve our names into trees. Unless the tree is razed to the earth, we anticipate that our names will remain stored. At the same time, our experience of carving our names in the wood is also stored as memory. Remembering the experience testifies to the trace that remains. Yet memory and memory traces are not indistinguishable from one another, hence Wittgenstein’s rebuttal: “An event leaves a trace in the memory; one sometimes imagines this as if it consisted in the event’s having left a trace, an impression, a consequence in the nervous system…whatever the event does leave behind, it isn’t the memory” (Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 220). Distinguishing memory from memory traces need not render the traces void. Instead of being a substitute for memory, traces can be seen to establish continuity in the sense of being a medium between temporal episodes. Despite this identi-

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fication of memory traces as continuity builders, the question of where those traces are stored remains unanswered. Approaching the monument against a representative context, the temptation is to argue that mere material is transformed into memory-imbued material once it acquires a particular experience that would individuate it from other things. Thus, a building destroyed through war distinguishes itself from the landscape of a city by testifying to an event that it alone underwent. In the ruins, history is said to be embodied. Preserving the state of disrepair establishes a constant reminder of an event which is grounded in the assumption that the act of destruction imparted a trace upon the building. Architecturally, the memory trace manifests itself as the structural negation of either the totality of the building or otherwise an isolated aspect of it. Where monuments are created from ruins, the memory trace is thus evident. Sentiment and intuition demand that we are more receptive to objects that have first-hand experience of suffering, the reason being that they are more able to bear witness to events than those that monumentalize through either proxy or speculation. A recreation of a ruin invariably flatters, since the reconstruction of experience can only ever allude to what was experienced: “One is asked to imagine creeks running red with blood,” writes Robert Harbison of artificially ruined monuments, “and the noise and confusion of battle, whilst around one is the most torpid farmland weighed down by summer height” (Harbison, 1991, p. 46). The replica seldom avoids being an artifice. Where collective memory is concerned, there is nothing inherent in the monument which guarantees the emplacement of memory. As far as intimacy is pre-requisite for memories being “fixed in space,” the monument falters. The exception to this is when a memorable event occurs in the spatial proximity of the monument. Being memorable does not, of course, mean being momentous. Often it is the most banal events that become the most remembered. With the monument acting as a backdrop, the event becomes inextricably bound with the object so that the event is recalled each time the monument is encountered. A qualitative property inherent in the monument does not make it memorable, but rather the events that contextually surround that monument which, in turn, animate the monument. What distinguishes a monument from an inert mass of material is the possibility of lived experience being entangled with it.

IV The failure of the monument, which I will criticize on ethical grounds in Chapter Sixteen, affirms a static image of history. Because of this, the colli-

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sion between the past and the present is aggravated, rendering history a pernicious presence. In his On the Uses and Disadvantages of History, Nietzsche argues that the sentimental reverence of the past makes humankind a dilettante spectator, deprived of its creative instincts and bereft of individuality: “he has become a strolling spectator and has arrived at a condition in which even great wars and revolutions are able to influence him for hardly more than a moment” (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 83). Deprived of his instinct and over-reliant on the past for guidance, Nietzsche’s description of humanity is as “mere abstractis and shadows” (Ibid., p. 84). Nietzsche suggests that such a state has arisen from two retrogressive impulses. In regarding the past as something “monumental,” the present necessarily falters in comparison. Yet through revering the “monumentalistic conception of the past,” the antiquarian simultaneously considers the past capable of being resurrected. For this possibility to emerge, “the past would have to be overlooked if it was to produce that mighty effect, how violently what is individual in it would have to be forced into a universal mould and all its sharp corners and hard outlines broken up in the interest of conformity!” (Ibid., p. 69). Such a partial recollection of the past inevitably fails. The apparent disregard for the present in exchange for a covert praise of the past translates as, “Let the dead bury the living” (Ibid., p. 72). Nietzsche’s subsequent reason for the reliance upon the past is the fetish for antiquarianism, because the fetish is preparation for our own demise. Venerating the past, the human hopes that the present will be revered by future generations. Time collapses for the antiquarian: “The history of his city becomes the history of himself” (Ibid., p. 73). In deeming the historic sovereign, an inability to experience the present without recourse to the past means that the antiquarian “accords everything it sees equal importance” (Ibid., p. 74). The manipulation of history converts the particular into a homogenous antiquarian space of retreat. What is presupposed in this subordination of temporal divisions is the continuity of history. How valid is this claim? In his essay, “Civilization and its Discontents,” Freud claims that all mental contents evade destruction and so are preserved, albeit at varying degrees of consciousness: “in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish—that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances (when for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to life” (Freud, 2001, p. 69). Clarifying this claim, Freud considers the task of archaeology. An ancient city, Rome or London, has a history that is revealed through historical accounts and archaeological surveys. Visitors exploring that city will be more adept at reconstructing the city’s past the greater their topographical knowledge, taking into considera-

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tion ruins and also the restoration of those ruins in the process. Such an account suggests that the past never entirely disintegrates, but integrates itself morphologically into the present. In the absence of an explicit historical narrative, where entire buildings are razed to the earth, the ruin becomes the medium through which a past is reconstructed. Correlating this account of spatial history with the mind, Freud is less assured. Doubting that a city is a “physical entity with a…long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phrases of development continue alongside the latest one,” so that, “where the Coliseum now stands we could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House,” the conclusion is thus drawn that the analogy, “leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd” (Ibid., p. 70). Absurd because, “the same space cannot have two different contents” (Ibid.). Instead, something has to give way. Freud’s negative analogy is an insightful one. Fictional horror is replete in accounts of varying pasts being resurrected from the dead, the assumption being that a layering of pasts is collected in time. Occasionally the demolition or gradual decay of a house fails to annihilate the past that imbues it. Dormant memory reappears in horror fiction in the guise of an ineffable presence that is identifiable with a particular place. In both cases, there is an uncertainty as to how a collection of memories can occupy the same place simultaneously. Freud’s analogy reminds us that mental preservation of the past is possible “on condition that the organ of the mind remains intact” (Ibid., p. 71). At the same time, remembering is only possible if memories either perish in time or otherwise resume dormancy in the unconscious. As with space, the mind cannot have two different contents simultaneously. Instead, memories are recollected and so drawn to attention before being forgotten as new experiences undergo the process of becoming memories. Likewise, place erodes, thus being manipulated as new experiences are created. Freud’s assertion that only an intact mind can preserve the past is evident in how place is often deliberately deconstructed with the hope of erasing that place’s past. Hence, ridding a room of its memories usually manifests itself as emptying that room of its contents before altering it structurally or otherwise embellishing it in such a way as to dispel any bond it had with the past. As the outward appearance of the room alters, the intimacy it has with the past dissolves. Irrevocable change in material objects serves to annihilate the memory those objects contain. If the history of a room is “sensed” despite its forced change, then the inclination to alter that room is usually reinforced, emphasizing the connection between memory and the mutability of place.

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V In the previous section, I examined how the subordination of the present to the past proved volatile because fixations of the past conflict with one another. At the same time, the intimacy between place and memory suggests that memory determines our experience with place. The reconfiguration of memory becomes possible when place is exposed to variability and alteration, debunking the monumental and antiquated version of history. Philosophically, the representation of history as monumental has not been exhausted. Let us take Hegel’s philosophy of becoming as an example. Here, the end of thought coincides with the advent of Hegel himself. Teleologically, becoming becomes being. In Hegel, we find the dialectical movement of thought ascending to the point whereby rationality itself becomes Absolute. For Hegel, Reason is the “Sovereign of the World” and “the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process” (Hegel, 1956, p. 9). Each preceding epoch is characterized by a development that, isolated from its context, appears as an empty abstraction. Once located in the historic narrative, the epoch reveals itself as being an intrinsic and necessary aspect of the same process: the progressive consciousness of freedom. Thus, the “stationary” civilizations of the Oriental World, being China, India, and Persia, had yet to attain the knowledge that humanity itself is free. Instead, “they only know that one is free” (Ibid., p. 18). Subordinate to history, the will of the Oriental subject is external to itself, while freedom is reserved to the ruling despot. Consciousness of freedom only arose with the Greeks when the “one” of the Oriental despot became the “many” of Greek democracy. Freedom was conditional insomuch as it was limited to the democratic minority. Yet the intra-dependence between citizen and state, manifest in the polis, was further evidence of incomplete freedom. Unable to conceive of itself as being isolated from its community, the Greek good is the good for the community. In turn, this obligation between the human being and the state blinds the human being to a finite freedom, evident in the Greek dependence on the oracle. Through being dependent on an entity outside of the polis, humanity is robbed of the ability to make independent and critical decisions. Consoled by faith, the Greek sacrifices freedom for pleasure. Only when “the German nations, under the influence of Christianity” arose did humanity become essentially free (Ibid.). After the corruption of the Church, a necessary stage in Hegel’s dialectic, no “mere abuse of power and dominion,” the deity was relegated from a spiritual existence to a material one (Ibid., p. 412). Because of this, human consciousness finally becomes free. The concern of the Enlightenment is to render this freedom

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actual. In reaching the Enlightenment, Hegel has reached himself, and his account of world history ends in his lecture hall. By positing a teleological account of history, Hegel submits to the model of Nietzsche’s antiquarianism. Hegel’s faith in rationality is such that he fails to see the progression of consciousness as, in the judgment of E.M. Cioran, “nothing but a procession of false Absolutes, a series of temples raised to pretexts, a degrading of the mind before the Improbable” (Cioran, 1998, p. 3). Cioran’s criticism is valid. The incessant subordination of the particular to the universal means that the failure of history, its lineage of destruction and death, can be deferred so long as the cause remains intact. This is why fundamentalism flourishes. Hegel’s nostalgia, paradoxically, is located in the future. As history beckons to catch up with the Absolute, comfort is gained in knowing that the temporal movements of history are necessary. In submitting to a nostalgic future, Hegel acknowledges the absence of the present and the presence of the past. What is for Hegel is not; conversely, only what was is. In Hegel, megalomania and piety, inextricably bound together, emerge flawlessly. Both his Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of History seek to incorporate the past into an Absolute present. The exclusion of causal contingency, Hegel included, is proof of this. Having outlived him, we are now able to refute his dogmatism. His failure is our ruin. From a vantage point unavailable to Hegel, we see that the various modes of consciousness leading up to freedom are only alterations, guises, and repetitions of one other. Only the expression has changed.

VI With Hegel, nostalgia reached its logical conclusion. Against the absolutism of his philosophy, counter-reactions appear throughout the nineteenth century: Kierkegaard’s onus on the subjective, Schopenhauer’s personal and philosophical derision of Hegel, Marx’s emplacement of Hegelian metaphysics in an economic mode, Max Stirner’s egoism, and finally Nietzsche’s demolition of foundational certainty. After Nietzsche, epistemological vulnerability is a given. In postmodern terms, we think that nostalgia has been reduced to pastiche and that habitual skepticism has achieved its aim of subverting the Absolute. For the postmodern subject, certainty evades. Temporal continuity is not an unfolding of linear progress, but a non-linear emergence of playful surface tensions. To what degree postmodernism has accomplished its disruption of the absolute is unclear. In the following chapter, this question will be pursued. Before we answer this question, a précis: my analysis of exile has concluded in a secularized homelessness, positing an impossible nostal-

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gia as its end. Recognizing nostalgia’s importance and impairment, the value conferred upon it was ambivalent. As the affirmation of the present becomes determined by the memory of an absent past, nostalgia veers toward the absolute. In Hegel, the spectral presence of the Absolute presented the ideal as a rational and fixed center. With the hope that the static and rational home has been dislodged, we now turn to postmodernism.

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The Decline of Postmodernism? Repentance is part of post-modernity. Baudrillard (1995, p. 35)

I When postmodernism rejected the Enlightenment notion of foundational rationality, it appeared to reject the logic of the Absolute. Originally conceived to undermine dogmatic faith through rational means, the Enlightenment aspired to reclaim the spirit of progression from the Renaissance. At its center, the Enlightenment sought to reduce social and political notions to the scrutiny of public “Reason.” Inspired by the progress in science, equivalent progression was thus thought possible for humanity. Moral progress meant a rationalization of the animalistic, uncivilized, and irrational. Because the irrational was associated with contingency, subjectivity, and the impermanent, objectivity became sovereign. Distorting the “natural light” of reason, passion was subordinated as an impediment to establishing knowledge. With such aspirations, the Enlightenment falters from the perspective of contemporary history. Because reason has become indefinable, purely an abstraction, rationality, order, and linearity exist only insofar as they are manipulated to the end of an individual cause. The very ambiguity of reason means interpretation is able to readjust and redirect its use. Normativity and rationality have finally disbanded. Instead, justification is rooted in the principal that aligns an ethical or epistemological “ought” with the value that appears most durable. About the persistence of reason, Feyerabend writes: “the content has evaporated; the aura remains and makes the powers survive…all it does now is to lend class to the general drive towards monotony” (Feyerabend, 2002, pp. 11–13). What results from this strategy is a reductive dogma, depleted of ambition and diluted from its origins. The debunking of the Enlightenment principle of enlightened knowledge is logical because it supposes a normative mode of epistemology in which thought aspires to a definite point. Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition affirms the loss of faith in reason by positing a non-foundational epistemology in the place of rational unity. As a disillusioned Marxist, for Lyotard, the modernist framework of epistemology, defined by legitimizing “master narratives,” is no longer ten-

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able since the Second World War. By way of ascertaining whether postmodernism has refuted the vocation for the absolute, let us review Lyotard’s main argument in detail.

II Resolving the epistemological doubts that arose from the ruins of modernity by identifying them as Wittgensteinian “language games,” Lyotard’s critique of the absolute entails a rejection of modernity’s aspiration for epistemic sovereignty. With modern epistemology, loosely following the classical model of the Enlightenment, we find an arbitrary distinction between idea and representation. The contingency of this distinction does not mean that epistemology is undermined. By aligning the subject with the guarantor of knowledge, epistemological foundationalism resulted in the Cartesian model of “clear and distinct” ideas. The innate rationality of the mind entailed that knowledge was possible so long as consciousness became aware of its transcendental faculties. Hence, the principal aim of Descartes, then Kant, is to make transparent the correspondence between subject and object, or sense and reason. The mirroring of the objective world thus implicates a passive mode of consciousness in which the imposition of the mind’s faculties is suspended upon them being recognized. The conceptual debate between the naïve naturalism of the classical epistemic model and the sub-structured concept of the active mind, which determines the object in accordance with unconscious motives and desires, marks a central struggle in modern philosophy. The “emancipation” of the subject falters as the subject recognizes its own duplicity. After Adorno, the correlation between subject and object reveals itself as violently forced, so that the subject only knows the object once it has overpowered the objective world. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “A dialectics no longer ‘glued’ to identity will provoke either the charge that it is bottomless—one that ye shall know by its fascist fruits—or the objection that it is dizzying” (Adorno, 1966, p. 31). Adorno does not withdraw from epistemological vertiginousness. Because non-identity refuses to present concepts in such a way that they appear continuous, such a mode of thought leaves open the residue of history and knowledge: “discontinuity and universal history must be conceived together” (Ibid., p. 319). After Auschwitz, Adorno’s powerful demythologizing of identity thinking leaves exposed the ruins between subject and object, whereby “the Enlightenment relates to things as the dictator to humans” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1997, p. 12).

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Adorno’s model of fragmented knowledge, together with his critique of instrumental reason as a political tool, establish the conditions for philosophy’s retreat into impuissance, especially in the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, throughout the twentieth century. Epistemic faith in the corresponding interplay between subject and object is exchanged for a heedfulness of the construction and structure of language. The refinement of philosophy through the analysis of semantic statements, evident in Frege and Wittgenstein, although now beginning to lose its sway in academic philosophy, meant that subjectivism became outmoded as private thoughts were replaced by public language. With the disruption of the autonomous subject, Lyotard is able to counter the absolute by his attempted destruction of the “metanarrative.” In Lyotard’s analysis, the metanarrative is an overarching and speculative fable that either legitimates science and/or emancipates humanity. The metanarrative depends on the Wittgensteinian idea of the language-game, a game that presents language as having a binary opposition between either/or. The homogenizing, identity-claiming instinct of the metanarrative is only disrupted when knowledge is contextualized and shattered, reducing the metanarrative to the “little narrative.” This reduction takes place when we have accepted the “atomization of the social into flexible networks of language games” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 113). Whereas the classical model of language sought to maintain the principle of epistemic foundationalism, Lyotard prefers to speak of an “agonistics of language,” whereby, “to speak is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech-acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics” (Ibid., p. 10). The reduction of language to a self-conscious mode of limitation is repeated in the outmoding of grand events to their contextual counterparts. With the little-narrative engineered by students and workers in the 1968 événements, active engagement was defined by particularity. The objective of the event extends only to the particular present, namely that of disseminating knowledge. Consequentially, the resurrection of normative standards, moral resolutions, and other such fixed aspirations are relegated to the implausible. Lyotard writes: I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the dialectics of the Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth. (Ibid., p. xxiii)

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Lyotard’s “incredulity” toward the metanarrative is central to the temporally continuous identity of postmodernism. Modern academia does its best, if often in a perfunctory and diluted manner, to fulfill Lyotard’s skepticism by being cautious about categorical claims. More broadly, the resistance toward the metanarrative manifests itself in a discursive and playful fashion. The arbitrary distinction that modernity made between concepts and meaning, informing a hierarchy of being, was able to be challenged from the postmodernism perspective, since the objective validity of truth and falsehood was now deemed obsolete. Coupled with the war on the metanarrative, the perpetual struggle for local narratives to surpass each other in disrupting epistemological normativity takes precedence. The struggle takes place, notably, in spite of the “incommensurable” rules governing each local narrative and language game. By aligning skepticism with philosophical relativism, producing a vague version of epistemological contextualism in the process, postmodernism manages to carefully evade counter-refutation on the basis of truth, often deeming refutation an act of spurious objectivity, or worse, an expression of power. In the words of Foucault, “We are subjected to the reproduction of truth through power, and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth” (Foucault, 1980, p. 132). The impetus of Foucault’s concern is warranted. This concern has not, however, prevented postmodernism from establishing a reinforced dogma whereby, through the rhetoric of truth and falsehood, the elimination of the “other” is a given. The anti-theory strand of postmodernism, manifest principally in the rejection of epistemological foundationalism and “logocentric projects,” compels postmodernism toward pluralism and particularity rather than unity (cf. Sloterdijk, 1988 and De Man, 1986). Thereafter, the claim that truth is duplicitous has meant that truth has been reduced to an everyday context, no longer able to speak on behalf of collective peoples. Paul de Man famously wrote, “Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself resistance” (De Man, 1986, p. 19). If philosophy is liable to such a false totality, then science, by applying natural science to the humanities, pushes the logic of rationality to an insidious conclusion. The emergence and momentum of postmodernism coincided with the incipient failure and misuse of science. “It became clear,” writes Pauline Marie Rosenau, “that in some cases modern science legitimated the preferences of the powerful, justified normative positions that were mere preferences rather than “scientific facts” (Rosenau, 1992, p. 10). The instigation of “scientific facts” only becomes defensible in the context of the metanarrative. In relying upon the metanarrative for the validity of its truth,

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however, science denies its own legitimacy. Verification, falsehood, and proof remain variables autonomous from the notion of science qua science. Because of this self-identifying interplay, for Lyotard, “true knowledge is always indirect knowledge; it is composed of reported statements that are incorporated into the metanarratives of a subject that guarantees their legitimacy” (Lyotard, 1994, p. 107). Against the totalizing thread of modern science, Lyotard puts forward a model of postmodern science in which volatility, discontinuity, and paradox become priorities. Lyotard writes, “postmodern science…is changing the meaning of the word knowledge, while expressing how such a change can take place. It is provoking not the known, but the unknown” (Ibid., p. 60). Lyotard’s inflated claims have not aged too well. The initial resistance against scientific dominancy has resulted, firstly, in an exposure of postmodernism’s factually erroneous grasping of the natural sciences (cf. Sokal and Bricmont, 1998), and secondly, in the preservation of inane claims for the sake of opposition, often leading to absurd conclusions (cf. Latour, 1988). In between these two conclusions, the attraction of postmodernism persists because it enables ideology and epistemology to be compounded. Thus, science is countered, not on empirical grounds—which, due to general ignorance, are quickly de-prioritized—but because scientific claims disclose an oppressive interplay between subject and object. Yet the claim that causal laws fulfill a “masculinist stereotype,” conceptually inane, also asserts the dominance of the postmodernist ego over the non-postmodernist subject. Two questions arise from this consideration of postmodernism. Firstly, how does Lyotard evade implicating a metanarrative of his own in this dissent from modernity? Secondly, how does postmodernism negotiate the problem of pragmatic engagement without recourse to the hierarchical scheme of epistemological foundationalism? For both questions, the very prescriptiveness of the postmodernist project appears to denote an imperative situated in a broader narrative. Richard Rorty noted this move when he remarked how, in refuting the metanarrative, postmodernism re-affirms the role of philosophy as a particular breed of metanarrative (Rorty, 1984, p. 56). Much of the impetus of postmodernism derives from Dada. Unlike Dada, however, postmodernism falls short, refuting its own stance on account of expounding an inconsistent set of claims. Let us explore the shortcomings of postmodernism in greater depth by examining the merits of Dada.

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III While the Romantics opposed reason with passion, redeeming the error of reason in the process, Dada’s split from reason was more radical. Dialectically, reason is not to be outdone strategically by being supplanted. Instead, it is displaced by unreason. Caustic, obtuse, and later ruined by Surrealism, Dada’s conception in 1916 was a direct reflection on the rational impetus of the First World War. The desire to revolt against the bourgeois penchant for rationality was strong enough to compel Tristan Tzara to define Dada as “signifying nothing.” Echoing Nietzsche, Tzara writes: There is no ultimate Truth. The dialectic is an amusing machine which leads us to opinions we should have had in any case. Do you think to have established the preciseness of these opinions by the minute refinement of logic? Logic stained by the sense is an organic illness (Tzara, 1918, p. 21).

Thus we find pictures made from disused rubbish, profane objects rendered dignified, and banal satires on the still life. An example: Hugo Ball, the inventor of Dadaist phonetic poetry, draped in azure cloth and golden cardboard, with a cylindrical shaman’s hat on his head, chanting poetry in a manner that corresponds to the equilibrium of the vowels, distributed exclusively in relation to the phonic value of the initial line. Dada’s emphasis on the nonsensical and banal refused the possibility of redemption or sanctuary. Only nonsense would suffice as a rejoinder to “rational” violence. That the intensity of revolt would be consumed through its own nihilism was a necessary path for Dada. The disparaging aspect of Surrealism is that it resurrects Dada with an affirmative guise. Yet where Dada succeeds, postmodernism fails. Dada’s preclusion of sustained value entails an abstracted unity. Its dissolution had to happen. To the advantage of the Dadaists, by excluding any claim to the nonhistoric, the loss of meaning is inevitable and desired. While history is able to be categorized in terms of reactions and post-reactions, that these stages are suitably dead is evident from their museum status. Cryogenically stored, they are now objects for admiring curators. To this extent, Dada succeeds. The movement’s aspiration is limited by its (in)capacity, while its destruction posits nothing in return. This conclusion is arrived at through creating an absence. The annihilating implosion that Dada presupposes excludes the impression of mourning from its subject. We can only mourn what has been lost. In Dada, nothing is lost and nothing is gained. Postmodernism seeks to overthrow modernity in order to replace it with post-modernity. The metanarrative is undermined. Disillusioned with the ab-

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solute, postmodernism humbles itself with a multiplicity of little narratives, each of which strives toward a different perspective on the same subject. In that unified disunity, the elimination of the “other” is said to be salvaged from obscurity by being abstracted from a totalizing narrative. Can we expect the incredulity toward the metanarrative to exclude nostalgia for it? The penchant for a “little narrative” plainly echoes a substitution for a lost modernity. In the rejection of the metanarrative, the danger emerges that the little narrative fills the absence space, creating an epistemological set of definite claims in the process. Epistemological contextualism does what it can to discount claims to totality by arguing that knowledge is only intelligible in a specific context. Within that context, knowledge legitimizes itself through being employed, a claim constructed by Nietzsche a hundred years before postmodernism: We simply lack any organ for knowledge, for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ (or believe or imagine) just as much as may be useful in the human interests of the human herd, the species; and even what is called ‘utility’ is ultimately also a mere belief, something imaginary, and perhaps precisely that most calamitous stupidity of which we shall perish some day (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 354).

The employment of context-sensitive knowledge suggests a nonprivileged epistemology and skepticism toward constructive methodology. The false consciousness of this perspective is clear. The covert inclusion of rationality in the postmodernist project, often limited to the Nietzschean mode of perspectivism, prohibits postmodernism from a consistent form of epistemological contextualism, since rationality is already presupposed in the contextual criterion for knowledge. Repeating the consolatory interchange between the metanarrative and the little narrative, the ruined remains of rationality in postmodernism are central in the creation of the fixed postmodernist identity. Distinguishing itself from the Enlightenment notion of universal rationality has not meant that postmodernism has dispensed with rationality altogether. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno’s consistent consideration of instrumental reason as domination, the postmodernist skepticism toward rationality has translated as the preservation of a rationality, which enables the previous rationality to be demythologized. The particular logic of postmodernism, as rationally consistent as the Enlightenment claim to universal reason, only disintegrates when it applies a meta-critique against its own methodology. The inconsistency of postmodernism exists because the desire for destructive rationality coincides with its concealment. Derrida’s wholly

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logical and analytically sound mode of deconstructionism is a prime example of this concealment of destructive reason. By subverting the metanarrative and the Enlightenment conception of rationality, postmodernism involves a mode of nostalgia that depends on what was annihilated to affirm itself in the temporal present. Because of this negative identity, postmodernism remains locked in the past despite its attempt to evade temporal determinism. The incompletion of the present is reinforced as postmodernism withdraws from a committed stance into a conceptual impasse. Let us examine this temporal ambivalence in greater depth.

IV In his The Illusion of the End, Jean Baudrillard puts forward the thesis that history is slowing down, whereby it is now vanishing (Baudrillard, 1995, pp. 1–9). For Baudrillard, the end of history, celebrated by Hegel and then readapted in a politically dubious format by Francis Fukuyama, is no longer possible because history refuses to catch up with itself. A gradual disintegration of temporality, framed by the distorting influence of the media, technology, and an increase in temporal velocity, mean that a return to the “original concept of history” is impossible (Ibid., p. 6). In place of history, Baudrillard posits a “realm of simulation” characterized by non-linearity, an absence of historical reason, and a lack of a final goal (Ibid., p. 7). In positive terms, history is defined as a “chaotic formation.” Baudrillard writes: Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end....we shall not reach the destination, even if that destination is the Last Judgment, since we are henceforth separated from it by a variable refraction hyperspace (Ibid., p. 111).

Baudrillard’s hypothesis presents an effective challenge to the linear notion of history. If history no longer moves, then history becomes untimely. Out-of-time and out-of-place, temporal depth is erased. As the future and past undergo doubt, a suffocating present closes in. Velocity, the only recognizable form of temporal passing, surges and withdraws but never attains an end. In the city, center of becoming, motion is illusion. The movement of things means only a change in their configuration. Despite Baudrillard’s attack on temporal closure, the enemy of a false fin de siècle does not immunize himself against historical emplacement. Against the “retroversion of history,” Baudrillard recognizes that historical events have lost their defining glory: “the event which is measured neither by its causes nor its conse-

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quences but creates its own state and its own dramatic effect, no longer exits” (Ibid., p. 21). Because of this non-event, the culture of remembrance and monumentality is reinforced. In Baudrillard’s analysis of cultural nostalgia, what matters now is the preservation of the already lived past. Unfortunately, Baudrillard’s homogenous perspective on history, whereby “the end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history,” entails a model of history which replaces linear progress with recycled events. He writes, “We have come to terms with the idea that everything that was not degradable or exterminable is today recyclable and hence that there is no final solution” (Ibid,. p. 27). In the middle of this inflated hyperbole and regrettable language, Baudrillard is able to evade the logical problem of being able to consider the closure of the end of history without positing a posthistorical event at that end (Ibid., p. 110). However, instead of resulting in a disruption of the absolute, the view of history in which events are recycled, itself a recycled view of Nietzsche’s, does not ruin the central historical axis but only defers that axis. Baudrillard always retains enough temporality for his position to become tenable. Yet, while the Hegelian account of history was transparent in its declaration of necessity, Baudrillard’s postmodernism is obliged to render the hyperreaility, in effect a meta-reality, necessary. In this way, temporal distance is gained, yet a simultaneous critique remains possible.

V Baudrillard’s duplicitous relationship with history is distinct to postmodernism. The relativist position central to postmodernism, whereby language takes precedence over concepts, means that history is reduced to a narrative, employing the same rhetorical tropes and stereotypes as fiction. Accessing the past, a problem which haunts the question of testimony, becomes questionable in postmodernism, since narrative is always open to a differing perspective. Where the preservation of memory is concerned, the contestation of a fixed past is desirable. After Auschwitz, a singular conception of history risks identifying particular testimony with a universal criterion. Testimony which fails to fulfill an already established model of history, hence, falls by the wayside. Hayden White’s treatment of historical representation and the Holocaust is partly effective because it exposes the historian’s implicit usage of conventional narrative structures to reconstruct the past. For White, the only differences between competing narratives is the “mode of employment” used (cited in Friedlander, 1992, p.40). The skepticism toward history as narrative is thus maintained for the same reasons that the metanarrative is re-

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jected. The privileging of the subject, the oppression of the “other,” and the presupposition of truth and identity all materialize (cf. Foucault, 1977 and White, 1978). The remains of history that emerge after postmodernism are fragmented, recycled, and reused. Because of this re-emergence of history, after the end of history has ended, irony and nostalgia tend to converge to resolve the tension between postmodernism and the past. In place of temporal linearity, temporal disjunction serves the role of disrupting historical narrative. Hyperreality, Baudrillard’s term, indicates a loss of reality whereby distinctions between surface, depths, real, and imaginary are no longer relevant. Already this mode of engagement has become domesticated as part of “intellectual history,” confined to a history of its own. Through displacing the old with the new, irony becomes postmodernism’s remedy to this devaluation of former values. In turn, this ironic relationship to the past discloses postmodernism’s irresolute nature and protracted nostalgia, if not for the past, then for the future. Baudrillard facetiously wonders if, “we could not just skip the rest of this century…pass directly from 1989 to the year 2000” (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 17). The consequence of this equation is that postmodernism lingers in a non-place while refusing to emplace itself in a temporal narrative. In this immobile perspective, the end of postmodernism coincides with its beginning, excluding progression in the meantime. Yet postmodernism is not content with abstinence. The mélange of pastiche, irony, and kitsch nostalgia are necessary means whereby postmodernism is able to maintain a connection with the past while avoiding being centered through the past. This ambivalent relation to the past, as something venerated and deconstructed, embodies the dubious aspiration to reconcile rationality with epistemological centrality. The fall into a nihilistic form of “playfulness,” whereby rigid distinctions are supplanted by the logic of disjunction, presenting itself as resolved, is suggestive of this incompatibility between rationality and centrality. Because it appears to resist post-rational bleakness, postmodernism is able to distance itself from the void. Yet the decline of postmodernism becomes apparent by the concessions it makes. Skeptical playfulness, so far a mode of discourse celebrated because it arms the unthinking and lazy academic with a set of already established tools, exposes postmodernism’s confusion regarding temporal progress. In the emergence of skepticism, a normative criterion is established that makes a claim for epistemological renewal. Because postmodernism refuses to acknowledge this renewal, it is obliged to compound normativity with discursion. In a historic context, such a valedictorian motive is already prefigured in Epicureanism.

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Like postmodernism, Epicureanism was a philosophy of consolation. Having conceded to the atomic and not divine structure of the cosmos, in retreating to their garden, Epicurus and his followers sought animate pleasure in a materialistic world where objects oscillated between atoms in the void. For postmodernism, the indeterminate anguish that follows from the denial of a fixed center is alleviated by a playful frivolity vis-à-vis this loss. By placing the onus on the surface, play makes a mockery of divisions between truth and falsity. The author Bret Easton Ellis writes: Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief…emotions that no one really felt anymore. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged (Ellis, 1991, p. 373).

That this engagement with the surface translates as the philosophical temperament for meditation and moderation is confirmed by the utilitarian role the surface has. The tools of postmodernism—pastiche, playfulness, and so forth—enable history to be revised and reread in accordance with subjectivity alone. Subjectivity hence becomes the guarantor of truth. Because these tools adopt the appearance of being plural, impartial, and irreverent, to infer that they are then immune from reason is an incredulous supposition. By submitting to that claim, we lend ourselves to a fragmented corruption of reason masquerading as a myth of dissent.

VI At the end of his The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard writes thus: We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and communicable experience. Under the general demand for slackening and for appeasement, we can hear the mutterings of the desire for a return of terror, for the realization of the fantasy to seize reality. The answer is: Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witness to the unrepresentable, let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name (Lyotard, 1984, p. 82).

In spite of Lyotard’s “war on totality,” enough of a conceptual agreement is reserved for him to construct a system of thought. The nostalgia for the absolute, now formed through negation and not a supposed “metaphysics of presence,” continues relentlessly. When postmodernism declared war on the metanarrative, a concession to unity, born of disillusioned optimism, was es-

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tablished. Since it involves a privileging of the postmodernist subject, epistemologically, the concession to unity is conceptually inconsistent and explicitly deceitful. In place of the enlightened subject, the postmodernist subject emerges as the bearer of anti-truth, itself a truth. Derrida has written: “There is no such thing as a truth in itself. But only a surfeit of it. Even if it should be for me, about me, truth is plural” (Derrida, 1979, p. 103). This accusation against relativism—that it already implicates its own fixed position—has undoubtedly been overused. Yet postmodernism has failed to negotiate between destruction and creation without recourse to epistemological incoherence. Simple self-consciousness concerning the contextualism and relativity of singular statements does not imply resolution. Instead, it entails conceited pretense. If postmodernism had affirmed a non-fixed conceptual site, the only tenable position would be silence. Instead, faith in reason continued to exist. With that promise, postmodernism was unable to resist. As a result of this philosophical diffidence, we can now see postmodernism’s narrative in its broader context: namely, as a stage in history. Reconsidering history after the Enlightenment, in light of the decline of postmodernism, we see how the last three hundred years have been an extended, irreversible, and prolonged retort against the decline of reason. Lyotard was undoubtedly correct in this respect, despite protracting the dissolution. From this perspective, we see how postmodernism, in spite of its philosophically credible aims, together with its frequently effective treatment of the duplicity of epistemology, has become the last embittered, averse resignation against this decline. Postmodernism’s vehement sense of temps perdu is wholly evident in that it feels obliged to convolute itself into the converse of what it supposedly seeks to destroy. In the following chapter, let us reconsider this narrative of decline, beginning with the Enlightenment’s conception of reason and presupposing that postmodernism embodies its eventual end. Only when this narrative has been outlined will postmodernism’s implications become clear.

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The Revolt of Reason To arms, citizens! Reason is dead. Jules Laforgue (cited in Jullian, 1971, p. 259)

I The history of reason is a history of decline, sustained by piety during the eighteenth century and delusion thereafter. Under the auspices of the German Aufklärung, or “age of reason,” reason would be compelled to undergo a meta-critique of its own constitution if it were to attain the status of being absolute and autonomous. Inversely, sophistry would be the result were reason to suspend the very device to which the critique was founded. In the preface to his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant writes, “Our age is, to a pre-eminent degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism all of our beliefs must submit. Religion in its holiness, and the state in its majesty, cannot exempt themselves from its tribunal without arousing just suspicion against themselves” (Kant, 1999, p. 45). Such was the fear of the Aufklärung. Having held reason accountable to its own critique, a skeptical impasse emerges whereby reason’s sovereignty is suspended by its own aspirations. Kant’s answer to this impasse was to suggest a middle way between dogmatism and skepticism, secured in “eternal laws of reason.” Adhering to these laws, philosophy is able to evade skepticism, since doubts themselves are measurable against the laws. Being laws of reason, dogmatic claims of faith are also liable to supreme examination. Since it presupposed the very foundation of the critique, the question of whether meta-laws also exist beyond reason was (inevitably) absent from the critique. For Kant’s critics, the prospect of a supposed middle path, whereby reason reigns sovereign was unconvincing. To take the most prominent example, consider Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Inspired by the conclusion drawn in Lessing’s Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza, Jacobi’s argument was that if reason were to be consistent, then it could not be excluded from any particular event. Thus, for every event that exists, a prior act must be involved to cause it. Incompatible with universal casualty is the belief in a prime mover or first cause: that is, God and freedom. Reason must end, either as it does with Spinoza, in a fatalistic and rational atheism or, if denied, in an irrational leap of faith. This radical dichotomy formed the crisis of the Aufklärung.

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Compounded with this philosophical crisis, the French Revolution carried out the logical conclusion of the Aufklärung. When the storming of the Bastille happened in 1789, before insurrection broke out throughout France, the enthronement of reason upon the high altar of Notre Dame was toppled in conjunction with absolute monarchy. Two days after the mob brought down the prison, the National Assembly ordered the symbol of despotism to be burnt. Thereafter, it took only a month for the aristocracy to be crushed. Logically, Jacques Hébert, founder of the Cult of Reason, who had initiated the goddess of reason into the Revolution, along with Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, was executed for being an ultrarevolutionary in 1794. Under the guise of his Cult of Supreme Reason, later the Cult of Supreme Being, the Enlightenment’s notion of rational progress reaches its destructive apotheosis through Maximilien Robespierre. Zealous, paranoid, and infatuated with Rousseau, Robespierre’s opposition to abolition was met with a desire to subjugate those who perpetrate dissent with violence. Intoxicated with the Supreme Being/Reason—let us assume that the two are inseparable—Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was grounded in an empty formalism inspired by the universality of a Kantian mode of rational discourse. Disregarding experiential consequences in place of abstract principles, Robespierre justified the use of violence with recourse to Kantian ethics. Robespierre orates: It has been said that terror is the principle of despotic government. Does your government therefore resemble despotism? Yes, as the sword that gleams in the hands of the heroes of liberty resembles that with which the henchmen of tyranny are armed. Let the despot govern by terror his brutalized subjects; he is right, as a despot. Subdue by terror the enemies of liberty, and you will be right, as founders of the Republic. The government of the revolution is liberty’s despotism against tyranny. Is force made only to protect crime? And is the thunderbolt not destined to strike the heads of the proud? (cited in Jordan, 1989, p. 153).

Robespierre’s ethical system would inevitability destroy itself. Arrested by the same Convention that brought him to power, Robespierre’s final hours before being guillotined were spent with his jaw dangling precariously from his face after a failed suicide attempt with a botched revolver, though some historians claim that Robespierre’s jaw was shot by a gendarme when he was arrested. After 1400 public executions, by the early nineteenth century the formal logic of reason was souring. Disenchanted by its ascetic and evidently pernicious formalism, the logic of reason had been replaced by the impetus of the passions.

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Among other places, we see such a transition in the predilection for landscape gardening. As the ceremony of elaborate parterres of geometrically symmetrical beds, with vistas of clipped yews in tubs and walks of peached elms and lines, became outmoded, the mood in nineteenth century landscape gardening moved toward the element of chance, disorder, and exoticism. We find the landscape gardener William Chambers suggesting a landscape of “terror” and “melancholy”: abandoned ruins savaged by wild animals, dungeons from which the screams of martyrs would resound, water organs serenading wax corpses of famous kings and their offspring. The effect was an aestheticized yearning for the exotic and dangerous. The loss of regularity and order marks the beginning of a different aesthetic sensibility. Broadly speaking, a transition occurs in the nineteenth century from reason to emotion, from the objective to the subjective, and from the exterior to the interior. In musical terms, the dialectical struggle is manifested initially in the tension between Mozart and Beethoven. The essentiality of Mozart, the lack of expendable musical content, means that his aesthetics is unified. Everywhere, security binds the music to a totality led by melody. Because of this, dignity and grace are central characteristics in Mozart’s mature music. In Beethoven, the totality opens itself up to fragmentedness. Particularly in the late quartets, Beethoven’s musical structure gives way to tonal ambiguity and a lack of modulation. In effect, rational melodic structure dissolves. If Beethoven initiated a critique of musical abstraction built upon rational modulation, then this challenge was adopted in Wagner before being concluded in Mahler, who marks the end of Romanticism. In Mahler, the contentment of Impressionism and Naturalism are displaced by a preoccupation with inner experience. Juxtaposing the grotesque and the sublime, Mahler stretched the reason of tonality, even the tonality of reason, by demonstrating its interdependence on unreason and irregularity. Let us hear the third movement of Mahler’s “Symphony No. 1 (Titan)” (1884–1888). The German version of Frère Jacques is countered by a funeral march which parodies both the solemnity of the march and the frivolity of the rhyme. The effect is a grotesque creation, which teeters between the comic and the tragic. Theodore Adorno, in his insightful work on the composer, writes: “Its striking originality is produced by the unity of the disorganized and the significant...the tonal Mahler knows the atonal means of linking through disconnectedness, the unmitigated contrast of ‘breaking out’ or breaking off as a means of form” (Adorno, 1992, p. 124). This radical conflation of tonality and tonal ambiguity was exploited by Mahler to the extent that Romanticism only becomes possible in terms of what it now negates.

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This negativity is defined, above all else, in Mahler’s valedictorian works where Romanticism becomes an object of disparagement and derision. “Symphony No. 9” (1909) mirrors both Mahler’s mortality and the closing of a historical epoch. Redemption is satirized, violently and remorselessly. The decline of tonality coincides with the emergence of the twentieth century. Whereas Romanticism had resolved thematic dissonance in music, Maher is conscious that resolution is no longer tenable. Musical form refuses to obey the conventions of ascent and order. Instead, effort is exerted before gliding into collapse and disorder. As this tension unfolds, nostalgia does not perish. In the final movement of Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde” (1907–1909), an entire lifespan is established before it disbands. Speaking of this final dissolution and its subsequent transition into Serialism, Wilfrid Mellers writes, “The chord on which the ‘Farewell’ finally fades into nothingness is a ‘verticalization’ of the pentatonic scale; and of all the melodic formulae the pentatonic is most void of harmonic implications. Yet out of harmonic disintegration grows a new seed. The linear principle of twelve-note music already is inherent in the texture of the music of Mahler’s last years” (Mellers, 1962, p. 79). Mahler’s evolution of extremity, whereby the tonality of reason is pushed beyond repair, expresses an impossible nostalgia. The nostalgia collapses as Nietzsche’s allusions to the twentieth century, whose horrors turned the passionate revolt of the nineteenth century Romanticism into the godless absurdity of Dada and existentialism, are confirmed. It is no coincidence that the 1920s gave birth to Serialism. In the absence of tonality, Serialism does not privilege a home key. Instead, unity is provided chromatically, in terms of rows and series of music, which are then juxtaposed against one another. Because Serialism lacks an absolute, certainty in resolution is not a potential mode of discourse. The connection between Serialism and later aleatoric music, where the performer or conductor chooses the order of succession of the composed pieces, is thus logical and consistent with the notion of rationality undermined. Serialism’s renunciation of a hierarchal tonal system parallels Existentialism’s pathos for the inherently contingent aspect of existence. Camus writes: A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable exile, because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, truly constitutes the feeling of Absurdity (Camus, 1942, p. 18).

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What give rise to this estrangement is also captured in Sartre’s dictum, “existence precedes and rules essence” (Sartre, 1956, p. 327). This implies that essence is only defined by human beings for themselves after they discover their existence. In effect, essence is made in the course of existence. At the same time, this construction might also be subtracted, voluntarily or otherwise. In the face of this “radical freedom,” revolt against the contingent becomes the call for praxis and not resignation. Existentialism, therefore, remains committed to a singular cause: the freedom of the subject. With this commitment, objectivity is marginalized on account of its non-human aspect. This is problematic for Existentialism, since it veers toward a solipsistic understanding of the world in which the self is the guarantor of truth. The raising up of the self to the absolute is disproved when radical freedom collides with an objective world which exists outside of the self. It might be objected that in this collision, the means to decide how to react are still present. But this is a questionable defense of a subjectivist position. A broader problem with Existentialism is its duplicity. Just as Existentialism recognizes the contingency of being, so it covertly prepares the groundwork for its necessity. In his essay on Beckett, Adorno notes this tendency as the permanence of the absurd: “Absurdity is relieved [in Beckett] of the doctrinal universality that in existentialism, the creed of the irreducibility of individual existence, linked it to the Western pathos of the universal and lasting” (Adorno, 2003, p. 259). Adorno’s claim identifies the dual nature of existentialism. Enough certainty remains so that genuine absurdity is evaded. A streak of aestheticism in existentialism preserves an image of continuity despite claims otherwise. After Existentialism was displaced by Sartre’s Marxism, it soon became entrenched as a static intellectual movement. In the withdrawal, postmodernism took advantage of the bleak concessions of post-war modernity and Existentialism by rendering uncertainty central. With the possible exception of Habermas, the promise of a Hegelian reconciliation (Versöhnung) is countered for postmodernism by an affirmation of the contingent, fragmented, plural, and singular. Disillusioned by the outwardly nihilistic implications of Existentialism, in the postmodernist context, nihilism shows itself as parodying, pastiching, and ironically distorting the past.

II The preceding account of concepts does not claim to be a genealogical analysis that situates intellectual history in causal terms. Instead, my intention has been to show, by way of historical examples, how rationality has informed

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modes of artistic and intellectual engagement. My account remains deliberately partial and incomplete: firstly, because intellectual concepts are viewed from a temporal perspective, and secondly, because I have sought to draw an idea rather than a system from these concepts. From the perspective of rationality alone, we see how the process to confront the failure of reason has been a struggle that has often reverted to claims of certainty and permanence. The temporal context of this position suggests that our thinking against reason has reached a natural conclusion. With it, the aspiration needs disbanding. With the desire intact, the failure to configure rationality in a postrational world urges frustration. The discordance toward the world, a feeling intimate to dogmatic “rationalists,” reflects a tired aspiration. Adorno, who undoubtedly stands apart from the history of reason in terms of his ability to not render his own critique of reason absolute, writes well of the totalizing aspect of rationality: “What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity” (Adorno, 1973, p. 5). Adorno’s remarks remind us that reason posits an either/or mode of thought in which the concepts in between those polarities fall by the wayside. Because of this, the term “reason” has become a variable on which an assortment of abstracted ideals can be constructed, often perniciously. That communism should form the final stage in history as liberal democracy should is just as rational. In both cases, we encounter an aspiration toward a definite moment, excluding the non-ideal. The term “freedom” likewise is a placeholder which only has significance for those proclaiming their freedom. As the justification for war, the “enforcement” of freedom upon supposedly unfree cultures can only be viewed as a declaration of despotism. The question of progress emerges when we realize that a rational account of history and the future relies upon notions of ascent and becoming. Yet where there is a fixed point, the possibility of becoming is limited. What exists once becoming has become? A toppling? An impasse? It is too early to say. Nevertheless, while reason endeavors toward the fixed becoming, it makes recourse to a denial of its supposed antithesis, decline.

III Decline is the imminent fall of a narrative already aware of its limitations. Decay is the outward manifestation of decline, which allows subjectivity to recognize itself in that narrative. If not seen as pernicious in their own right, decay and decline are an anathema to the progressive march of reason. Because decline has been mythologized as a negating, suppressing, and debas-

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ing force, a counter-suppression has been established on behalf of reason. The conflict means that decline remains incompatible with progress. The ideal of reason is permanence and epistemological certainty. Rational thought does not strive for what gives way. No rational certainty can co-exist with a process determined by entropy, other than that the process will repeat itself, so establishing temporal continuity. Even then, following Hume, causal necessity remains in doubt. Unable to rationalize decline, the aim of reason has been to shadow the mutable by affirming the permanent. The illusion is not dead. Thinking that we learn from our mistakes, we infer that during the next epoch, rational progress will finally fulfill its fate. Always the resolution of fragments is deferred. A protracted wait takes place, which is secured by faith. Let us consider that such a wait is already a mode of rational thought which predicates itself on the principal of linearity and temporal reconstitution. Restoration, structural or conceptual, means a return to a place that has since evaporated. Despite this, often a semblance of order, even when cracked, synthetic, and distinct from its origin, is preferable to failure. The wait is not abated. Yet what was once thought of as elusive slowly reveals itself as illusive. Can we aspire toward illusion if that illusion is already known in advance? With a trust in what the fallout of rationality discloses, the possibility of thinking after reason by salvaging what it suppressed emerges. The final interment of absolute reason begins when we have recognized the decline that reason, by means of vouchsafing the illusive, sought to subdue.

IV As destruction is waged, rationality undergoes doubt. Questions of providence and theodicy soon emerge. In the collision between reason and destruction, a state of being is revealed which contests rationality. To have correlated reason to “terror” would have been regarded, understandably, as morally suspicious, limited to the babble of insidious apologists who employ reason as a pretext for their own cause. Through habit, we restore the role of reason as soon as destruction is forgotten, not letting history violate the fate of progress. By confronting history without the framework of rational progress, what was previously disguised is unhidden: namely, that progress does not guarantee a definite future in which the past is able to be incorporated without any surplus remains. At the end of its present narrative, history’s morbid nostalgia toward reason has prevented us from ascribing virtue to decline and vice to formal abstraction. By being open to decline, reason is disputed and a critique of progress made possible.

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Still, our pronouncement is premature. For what is progress and in what direction does it move? The revision of a “Golden Age?” The resurrection of a utopia, lamentably destroyed by anti-progress? Eudemonia, the incurable condition that Aristotle diagnosed two thousand years ago, meaning the fulfillment of human potential: is this human progress? Any such account of progression is already pre-fixed by a return to a definite point, a presupposed perfection. By making visible progress in the natural sciences, perfection is thought possible as knowledge is developed. Thereafter, an equation between progress and the gathering of empirical data is strengthened. In the nineteenth century, this fervor for the progressive, which would amount to a slow secularization of history, reached a peak. Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism, outlined a theory of history whereby the metaphysical impulse for formless answers would give rise to the scientific and therefore empirical proof needed to decipher the world. The thought was that by supplanting faith with reason, progress is thus gained. Progressive, indeed, but only insomuch as one guise is replaced with another. Elsewhere, we find Feuerbach translating the language of Christianity into that of the humanistic and economic. As a result, the attempt to dispense with the past gives rise to progression rooted in humanism. Similarly, Marx, by advocating industrialized technology, rejects religion only to replace it with capitalism. This gradual secularization of history, in principal venerable, falters because old ideals substitute new ones. Faith becomes reason, God becomes human, and the religious disposition lies dormant but not wholly extinguished. In this interplay between appearance and reality, the necessary entwinement between progress and decline is realized. As progress rises, decline falls, and vice-versa. The decline of magic and superstition has entailed a rise in technology and science. We look back upon such pastimes with humor, as though to suggest that such credulous aspirations have been supplanted by our scientific viewpoint. The inextricable bond between decline and progress is especially evident in the fall of Christianity. In substituting humanism for Christianity, the regressive, puerile, and pernicious aspects of Christianity have been outmoded by progressive reforms in social and political life. After the decline of Christianity, resisted only by a minority, spiritual contortion and self-deception become essential as faith strives to preserve itself. In general, the greater this contortion becomes, the higher the march of reason ascends. That Christianity has become marginalized, resorting to justifying its presence as a social function, confirms its ineptitude and logical obsolescence. Decline, therefore, is already formed in the creation of progress. This is perhaps not evident as yet. So far, we have only encountered the re-

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transfiguration of the same ideal, albeit in a different costume. Handed from puppet to puppeteer, the distinction between concepts appears indistinguishable. Each age presents itself as more advanced than the former, since it appears to have incorporated the previous age. We are thankful to Positivism for having overcome the grandeur of metaphysics: improvements are read as dislocations. Gratitude emerges as the philosophical script is edited before being proofread by faithful commentators. Logical Positivism, no doubt, pushes this refinement to its logical conclusion. Stripped to its austere formality, the illusion presents a system completely devoid of superfluity and expressionism. What had preceded Positivism ceased to be valid. What remained was the abstracted form, cold and sterile. Ideally, we seek to arrive at a present whereby becoming has finally become being, where the formless has been formed. For us, this is where progress will end while the time of the “now” emerges. The everlasting now, demoted by Hegel and Husserl, and forced into the “meanwhile” by Levinas, presupposes a temporal convergence whereby history is progressively drawn. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin contests the view of history as “empty” and “homogenous” by positing the “presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 263). The time of the Jetztzeit is active, gathering the past as it unites history. Unlike history as “site” (a term which is vital for both time and place), Jetztzeit maintains a mystical quality which breaches formal time measured in segments. Instead, it introduces us to Benjamin’s oracular notion of “Messianic time [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgment, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe (Ibid., p. 265). The context of Benjamin’s statement is the notion of historical redemption, in which “the fullness of [the] past [redeems] mankind” (Ibid., p. 256). What “mankind” is being redeemed from is consignment to temporal oblivion. Against historical materialism, which Benjamin denounces because it supposes history to be static, the task of redeeming the past is dynamic and contingent: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Ibid., p. 257). The work of history, therefore, is active, vigilant against the “Antichrist” which destroys the memory of the dead. When we come to the celebrated description of Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” Benjamin’s pessimistic outlook on historical progress, despite his belief in “Messianic time,” implicates a struggle for memory: A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of

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•THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY• history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (Ibid., p. 259).

To “awaken the dead” would mean to preserve their memory, and thus their presence in time. In this way, the fallout of history is repaired; the wounds of destroyed time reconnected. Yet Benjamin’s pessimism marks the end of the angel’s effort. The angel is too close to the violence of progress, and so becomes part of its debris. Seen in the light of historical materialism, the fall of the angel appears to give way to Benjamin’s mystical reading of history. The view of history as “site” and “empty time” proves pernicious, as it suggests that the past is able to remain dormant. Messianic time, which Benjamin aligns with Jewish theology in the final two especially cryptic sections of the Theses, outmodes historicism’s concern with causality by “establishing a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time” (Ibid., p. 265). Benjamin’s ambiguous response to temporal progress, as engaged in a dialectical struggle between Messianic time and homogenous time, salvages the possibility of historical continuity. With that possibility, empty time is replaced with an implicit teleological account of time. The insertion of teleology, as though to give the temporal presence a clear significance, is marked by a “constellation which…has formed with a definite earlier one” (Ibid.). The constellation of history, instead of eroding, becomes preserved (in the Hegelian sense) in the temporal present. The constellation encircles time, bringing it close to the still indeterminate unfolding of time. The time of the now thus becomes the time of the every-now. Benjamin’s teleological account of history continues today, although now, it persists tacitly and in a diluted form. Securing a place in the world has a temporal dimension, which comes to determine the status of being. Yet enforcing a frame upon bare existence is only possible if the “now” remains in place. In contrast to Benjamin, for Schopenhauer, Jetztzeit entails a “cacophonous” quality, “as if its Now were the Now…the Now for whose production alone all previous Nows have existed” (Schopenhauer, 2000, p. 286). Schopenhauer’s criticism of now-time derives from his broader metaphysical framework. The Now emerges from the will-driven ego, individuated as its arrogance flourishes. Unlike Benjamin’s mystical evocation of Jetztzeit, Schopenhauer’s consideration of the Now is an assertion of ego. The time of

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the Now is my time, a consoling thought which assuages the struggle of history and the annihilation of memory. Schopenhauer’s response to Jetztzeit is unequivocal. In the face of destruction and want, boredom intervenes before new desires are created which lead us toward further suffering. Yet in the space in between the fulfillment of the Now and our boredom with it, “the utter barrenness and emptiness of existence becomes apparent” (Ibid., p. 287). We need not adhere to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic scheme in order to appreciate his view on anxiety and time. If the time of the now were united in its completion, then “mere existence in itself would necessarily fill our hearts and satisfy us” (Ibid.). Yet the present falters. With that faltering, the desire for the deferred “Now” is enforced, not crushed. Because decline arouses anxiety, each age tempts itself into the prospect of eternal being. In the midst of becoming and perpetual lack, the notion that our stage in history is only that, whereby it will be outmoded as it becomes refined by progression, is postponed. Instead, we stick to the present, as though it were the final present. The atemporality of the Now, staged in the becoming of being, is the final stage of progress. What binds the rational ideal, in the words of Cioran, is “the merit of defining the image of a static world where identity ceaselessly contemplates itself, ruled by an eternal present, that tense common to all visions of paradise, a time forged in opposition to the very idea of time” (Cioran, 1987a, p. 99). The stagnation of history thus coincides with the impression of rational progress. In Cioran’s reading of the “Golden Age,” time gathers the past rather than dispersing it. Because of this gathering, the homogenizing tendency of reason is able to identify the particular under the formal category of the universal. The opposition between Schopenhauerean time-as-destruction and the idea of an atemporal Now-time is limited. The destruction of the Now is inevitable and the continuity of time is protracted, but not fixed. Demythologizing reason means recognizing decline as the counter-remedy to the retrospective tendency toward absolutism. Out of that movement, a new model of progress is established in which descent replaces the bond between progress and reason. Diffidence, if not active dogma, has secured the persistence of reason. The obstinacy concerning faith in reason has solidified to the point of appearing permanent. Because of this, engagement with the other side of reason has hitherto gone unexamined.

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V As a consequence of our discussion, a foundation is required, whereby the regressive characteristics of reason guided in “fate” must be confronted by the progressive tendencies of decline. Much will be revealed, hitherto assuaged by rationality, as natural history proceeds to wilt in accordance with its own constitution. Likewise, the march of progress toward being becomes visible when decay and decline evade being identified with anti-progress. Where history has ended, our foundation shall begin. Where philosophy, so far under the impression that the enascent was the sacred, has ascribed the progressive to the ascendery, in the following groundwork, the descendery shall hold prominence. In short, we begin at the end. This is also the case for the Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov. Describing his musical aesthetics, he writes thus: “[it] is not the end of music as art, but the end of music, an end in which it can linger for a long time, it is very much in the area of the coda that immense life is possible” (Silvestrov, 1996, p. 6). Silvestrov’s remark rightly suggests an ambiguous placing of the end. In the space of the coda, the past persists in terms of fragments, memories, and still-dormant influences. Indeed, it would be contrived to suppose that there exists an exact divorce between temporal moments. In the shadow of progress, rationality does not subdue hastily or distinctly, nor should it be expected to. Suspicion of a premature ending would be legitimate were the boundaries between rationality and its absence easily defined. Instead, the coda bears witness to a re-emergence of previous modes of thought gradually surging and withdrawing. As such, identifying what determines the present structurally becomes harder as the life of reason continues despite being essentially outmoded. Nevertheless, recognizing the limits, and so ends, of rationality means recognizing a radical shift between temporal moments. Even in the ambiguous seeping of rationality into what we might term post-rational thought, the sudden seizure of that previous thought is identifiable in abstraction. Philosophy, it was stated in the preface to this book, has been reluctant to address the “postmemory” of an absent past which still persists and determines the present. Dwelling in that present, so long as the residue of history remains unexamined, becomes stifled as old methods are still adhered to. Readdressing the (im)balance between the past and the present would therefore require an active engagement with what exists on the other side of the temporal end. In that exploration, distance from the past is acquired and the continued presence of reason able to be measured.

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VI Since the expression of decline is interior and exterior to the self, it requires a medium to commune between these polarities. We are able to recognize decline as an exterior process of ruin and as an internal dynamic of reason fragmenting. History recalls countless examples of cultures in decline. Until the process of decline is rendered visible, its significance remains obscured. In Chapter Two, we have established a means by which abstraction becomes tangible. This conversion was demonstrated in how dynamic stasis was able to convey a distinct silence, which in turn was understood as an expression of nothingness. When we consider decline, we are obliged to consider decay as its counterpart. Aesthetic contemplation of the decayed object will allow the progressive nature of decline to resound. The aesthetics of decay, in addition to being of intrinsic interest, will frame our account of progressive dissolution. Our final concern will be to outline the foundation toward an aesthetic account of decay in which an affirmation of decline reigns sovereign.

Part Two

Succumbing to Dissolution I feel more as if I were filling a space that has been deserted. Giya Kancheli, Abii ne Viderem

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A Short History of Decay That which is falling should also be pushed! Nietzsche (1969, p. 226)

I “Once,” writes W.G. Sebald in his Rings of Saturn, “when I remarked that sitting there amidst her papers she resembled the angel in Dürer’s Melancholia, steadfast among the instruments of destruction, her response was that the apparent chaos surrounding her represented in reality a perfect kind of order, or an order which least tends toward perfection” (Sebald, 2002, p. 121). That the name “perfection” etymologically derives from the Latin “perficere,” to bring to an end, confirms Sebald’s equation between destruction, order, and perfection. Perfection and destruction, prima facie opposed, reveal themselves to be aligned as rational progress is contested by the march toward dissolution. From the vantage point of the temporal present, we are able to correlate progress with a proximity to decline. Progress, so far delayed by reason, emerges as the movement of rational consciousness falling into dissolution. The protracted decline of the West, originally determined by Oswald Spengler a hundred years ago, continues unabated today because the imbalance between ideas and experience persists. Only now, value and rationality have fissured, allowing the place of decline to be realized. Within this space, a formula can be established involving the becoming of perfection as the image of decay. From this perspective, consciousness is able to anticipate the disbanding whereby reason withdraws into silence as decline overpowers. Here, in the pathway of ruin, where presence gives rise to absence, and where silence determines the illusion of sound, the Nothing comes forth from dormancy. The abandoned place created by the absence of reason acts as a spatial terminus in which the embodiment of silence and nothingness occurs. The articulation of silence is realized in that hitherto, thinking has been engaged with a deceptive simulation, whose aspiration is to confer sound upon silence. In terms of the metaphysics of reason, we are confronted with an enclosing arc which surrounds the alterity of existence by enforcing order upon it.

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In submitting to the possibility of motionlessness, reason gives way to the après nous le déluge of silence and nothingness. Recall that the emergence of silence is dependent upon the antecedent violence that determines its being. Silence is the lingering aftermath of violence, the protracted resonance of its conception. Recall, too, that silence is thwarted when not brought about through violence. The presence of nothingness is analogous to the presence of an absent past, the continued existence of which depends upon the violence of its departure. Nothingness becomes actualized when the space once occupied by violence has been deserted, allowing the possibility of decline to emerge. In accordance with this principle, an age absorbed in the momentum of a struggle, the narrative of which adopts the semblance of rational progression, remains dulled to the Nothing. An age unfamiliar with the possibility of spatial dynamic stasis, imbued with a false aspiration toward the absolute, remains extroverted in character, unable to survey its foundation. In coming to a clearing, whereby the pretense of rational experience gives rise to a foreign absence, then progress and movement become viewable. Has any age other than our own been more aligned with this point of terminus ad quem? Marked by the future of decline, manifest outwardly as the ruin, the structure of the Nothing depends on its immediacy to decay. Prophetically, St. Cyprian writes: The world has now grown old and does not abide in that strength in which it formerly stood.…in winter there is no longer enough rain to feed the crops; in summer the sun is no longer hot enough to ripen the fruit, the land remains without farmers; the sea without sailors; the armies without soldiers (St. Cyprian, 1957, p. 56).

Undoubtedly, the historical context in which St. Cyprian was writing prefigured the present temporal context. Values no longer cohered. At once, progress meant the giving away of old forms, allowing the structure of a particular mode of thought to decay by itself. Such rhetoric of decay is neither allegorical nor abstract. We must not limit our understanding of decay by defining it as the sociological characteristic of an occasional Zeitgeist, as the decay of order, customs, or habits. The task ahead is not to perform a genealogy of social disorder. The desire to restore moral decline by identifying the cause of a society’s downfall, in turn endeavoring to repair the errors, is of a marginal interest here. The ontological significance of decline exists in the loss of a world-view which no longer aligns with lived experience. In the present work, the significance is the rejection of reason on the grounds that reason is an expression of nostalgia and that to convey a sense of nostalgia is to tacitly assert absolute reason. Remaining open to progress means ventur-

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ing to a space in which the headiness of protracted and rigid nostalgia, along with its idealization, has dissolved. The ontological implication of decay is simultaneously material and immaterial. By dint of aesthetic appreciation, the physical manifestation of decline, be it the classical ruin, the disused boatyard, or the charred pier falling into the sea, creates a unity between space and the idea dormant in that space. In the gaze of decayed place, decline individuates itself. What we see in the place rouses the imagination. Through an imperceptible yet dormant correspondence between consciousness and the ruin, an uncanny dynamic emerges in which ruin and subject are recognized in each other. As the ruin mirrors the fragmentation of reason, so subjectivity bears witness to the future of rationality. How these two aspects manage to correspond will be explicated in turn.

II Though the manifestation of decay has been suppressed and celebrated according to the ontological configuration of different historical epochs, decay presupposes the very experience of a narrative form: “Decay is inherent in all conditioned things,” writes Maha Parinibbana-Sutta, “Strive diligently!” (cited in Roth et al., 1997, p. 69). To render our own position tenable, we would do well to consider how history has interacted with decay, externally and internally. What follows, then, is a brief history of differing perspectives toward decay and ruination. The history of decay corresponds with a critical awareness of the mutability of time. Observing the organic structure of life, in the minds of ancient civilizations, we find a resistance against decay which borders on fervor. The Mesopotamians demonstrate this fervor perfectly. Against the conceit of the Egyptians, an altogether less sanguine view of decay than that of the Mesopotamians occurs. This should not come as a surprise. With the Sphinxes, caught between the Pyramids, mutability is disproved by their persistence in time and space. It is no coincidence that the monuments of Mesopotamia have become rubble in the face of time: “mere man—his days are numbered; whatever he may do, he is but wind” (Jacobsen, 1967, p. 137). While Egypt was maintained by the consistency of the Nile, with the Mesopotamians, we find a ravaged civilization, determined by the force of the Tigris and the Euphrates. Plagued by dust, scorched by the winds, and rendered immobile by rivers of mud, the environment of Mesopotamia ingrained a pessimistic streak upon the collective consciousness of the Mesopotamians. Thus, the autonomous pride of the Egyptians is subjugated by a sense of caution and

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impotence in the face of nature. In this indignant context, the Mesopotamian consciousness revolts against the inevitability of decay. Convinced that nature was against them, the Mesopotamians saw death as the absolute evil against which any claim to a just world was ruined. In the myth of Gilgamesh, we read how the ruler of Uruk, Gilgamesh, developed a quest to unearth everlasting life after witnessing his companion Enkidu fall ill and die. In the mountains, Gilgamesh searches for Utnapishtim, an ancestor whose life has been prolonged by the Babylonian elixir of life. Having found Utnapishtim, disappointment ensues when prolonged sleep is offered in place of the elixir of life. Thus, Gilgamesh falls into unconsciousness. Soon, however, he is awoken out of pity by Utnapishtim’s wife. Again, Gilgamesh is offered an antidote to his melancholy. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh about a plant embedded on the seabed that is capable of providing eternal life. Once the plant is captured, Gilgamesh returns to Uruk, leaves the plant on the bank of a pool, and bathes. Nearby a snake takes the plant and retires with it down below. The myth concludes: having stolen the elixir of life from Gilgamesh, the snake is able to shed its skin while it ages. Gilgamesh, meanwhile, remains locked in a human shell, unable to shed his skin and proceeding instead toward death. Distraught, bitter, and with Gilgamesh’s aspirations aborted, the myth reveals the ancient view of decay as pernicious to life. The Mesopotamians sought refuge in the promise of eternal life. This promise was undermined, however, as decay countered temporal cessation. That the symbols of decay should be suppressed, ignored, or denied as deleterious to life was no surprise. If such a negative perspective was momentarily inverted during the fall of the Roman Empire, the Christians were later to implant it as an idée fixe. Despite their prosperity in the polis, the Greeks themselves were not oblivious to decay. Consider the myth generated by the Greeks of a previous civilization in exile from the present. Plato saw fit to allude to a lost world that compensated for the fallen present: “Men of earlier times were better than we and nearer to the Gods,” he writes in Philebus. In our pursuit of the Ideal, the promise of Atlantis continues to entice. Devoid of mutable erosion, Plato’s otherworldly Forms affirm his aspiration for a state of permanency resistant to mortal decay. Because mutability and an epistemic model of foundational certainty oppose one another, the Forms imply a metaphysical evasion of decay whereby content is subordinated to structure. Plato was able to subjugate the contingent aspect of empiricism by establishing the superiority of immutable Forms, so securing the conceptual framework for experience. Even in Empedocles, we find decay disparaged. In his work, Purifications, Empedocles writes of a biblical Fall, whereby punishment is

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mortality. With the exception of Heraclitus, for whom the becoming of process entails an affirmation of both growth and decay, this would be the prevalent view toward decay. After the decline of Rome, an aesthetic interest in decay was to be extinguished for the next two thousand years. Let us read Lucretius: And now already our age is decayed. The earth grows weary and can scarce create small animals—earth that once created all the generations of men and gave birth to the gigantic bodies of beasts—the same earth once created spontaneously for mortal men the golden corn and the joyful vines…and now they will scarcely grow with all our labor, the old plowman sighs often, bewails his fruitless labor and compares the present time with times past, praising often the good fortune of his father…everything slowly decays, marching toward the tomb, exhausted by the ancient lapse of time (Lucretius, 1994, p. 128).

Lucretius counters the rise of Christian godliness. After Rome, decay had exhausted itself, simultaneously engineering nostalgia, piety, and abstinence. Already in 410 AD, a premature nostalgia had formed by imagining Rome’s past as a rational ideal. Cicero writes: Before our time the customs of our people produced outstanding individuals, and ancient customs and traditional institutions were preserved by eminent personalities. In our age, however, the state has come to be like a painting which is remarkable but already fading because of old age (Cicero, 1974, p. 245).

In the ancient consideration of decay, individual decay mirrors social decay and vice-versa, the suggestion being that the present had betrayed the past. The implication of this is a nostalgic idealization of the past. Because of the collective need for permanency, decay was posited as antithetical to progress. Decline, decay, and dissolution were only evident when Rome was bowing before the Barbarians for relinquishment. How telling this is! When Rome was verging on collapse, a concession to failure was made which enabled decay to become aesthetic. Had the Romans been concealing the aesthetic aspect of decay? Or, having nothing but wealth to lose, was indulgence a compensation for ruin? The temporal conditions under which decay becomes aesthetic or derided are clearly evident. With their physical existence immanently threatened, their Empire falling, the insidious feature of decay suddenly dissolved. If all is ruin, what is left to fear? With this, Rome’s merry Epicureanism arose and the inimical view toward physical destitution subsided. Rome, however, was an exception. Thereafter, we seldom discover a dissolute Empire equating redemption with decadence.

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In Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus” 1827–1828 (Fig. 1), the dynamic between defeat and decline converges perfectly. In view, we find the King of Assyria, unable to defend the approaches of the enemy, reclining languidly on the royal bed as he prepares to take his own life and those of his wives and slaves. Glittering like burnt fragments, discarded jewels, vessels, and gold lie between azure-toned cloth and ornamental sheathes. One woman, burying her face in a green drape, besides a figure whose countenance resembles Pan, withers ecstatically. Another woman, whose neck is being gouged by a dispassionate slave, holds her head aloft, her back arched as she reclines convolutedly. In the background, a crack in the wall reveals a temple burning in the distance. The scene is musty decay, sufficiently remote from the approaching danger to entail the sublime.

Figure 1: Eugène Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus,” 1827– 1828. Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Rome’s resignation to destruction and decay is illustrated perfectly by Delacroix’s tapestry of licentious decline. Roman decline becomes festive as decay resists passive submission into rationalization. This strategy is re-

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peated in negative terms in Stoicism, where we find Seneca, tutor to Nero, adhering to morality despite the Empire disbanding. The psychology of the moralist compels an antithesis. In Epictetus, servility and imprisonment do not preclude moral nobility. Instead, decay reinforces “nobility,” because it enables morality to affirm itself. As the Empire fell into indulgence and decadence, Seneca was found restraining from passion, exclaiming the virtues of reason, debasing his body while contemplating “noble” suicide. Rome clearly proves the polarized view of decay as oscillating between reverence and repulsion. Speculating about the end of the end, Jean Baudrillard writes: We used to ask what might become after the orgy—mourning or melancholia? Doubtless neither, but an interminable clean-up of all the vicissitudes of modern history and its process of liberation (of peoples, sex, dreams, art and the unconscious— in short, of all that makes up the orgy of our times), in an atmosphere dominated by the apocalyptic presentiment that all this is coming to an end (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 22).

After the ruins of Rome, Christianity had already prefigured Baudrillard’s diagnosis of modern history by reintroducing the view of decay as insidious. For Christianity, earthly existence was redeemed by a belief in a promised after-life. Decay was thereby seen as an indication of the imperfect nature of fallen earthliness. Ecclesiastes, to take an immediate example, is replete with references to the “vanity” of fallen existence: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and vexation of the spirit” (1:14). In the Romans, the Christians had witnessed a correlation between excess and decline, which they sought to revise. In 1116, we find Archbishop Hildebert urging, “that ancient Rome’s remains be left unrestored as witness of heavenly chastisement” (cited in Lowenthal, 1985, p. 173). In the sixteenth century, we discover Charles Estienne’s anatomical treatise, De Dissectione Partium Corporis Humani, inside of which are illustrations of the parallel between “heavenly chastisement” and decay. With one hand tied behind his back, the other holding his chest wall open, as though to invite the viewer to peer into his cavity, we find a figure seated upon a ruined monument with foliage sprouting from his feet. Anatomically explicit, the moralistic overtone of the image reminds us, memento mori, of the frailty of the mortal condition. In the fall from permanency, Christianity could only survive by ascribing decay to transgression. St. Gregory of Nyssa writes how, “Corruption has its beginning in birth and those who refrain from procreation through virginity themselves bring about a cancellation of death by preventing it from advancing further…” (St. Gregory, 1952, p. 48). With this dogma established, the

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image of the self as a vehicle to transport the soul to the other world is conceived. The fall of Rome becomes synonymous with sexual transgression, while sin is viewed as an antecedent of decay as a result of this equation. That sexual renunciation should promise resurrection is apt: asceticism prides itself in being removed from physical mutability. The connection between corruption and decay is a frequent motif in the Bible (cf. Jude 1:10). This interdependence between the erotic and the eroded, which we will analyze later, is intimately bound with Christianity’s contempt toward decay: “a symbol of time’s destruction of ancient and autocratic power” (Piggott, 1976, p. 120). The ruin—the perennial icon of decay—reminds us of the consequences of voracious greed. Petronius’ Satyricon is read as an omen of the consequences of licentiousness. The Christian motive aligning decay with debasement was only partially broken, and only then through the Renaissance’s rediscovery of Rome, in the seventeenth century. Thrown by Copernicus into a cosmology of negation, the onus upon mutability, decay, and process was at the center of seventeenth century thought. Cosmological volatility stirred in consciousness profound disquiet and intense melancholy. The newfound flux of the world undermined previous certainties with a “metaphysical shudder.” Hence, we find the seventeenth century astronomer, Thomas Digges, writing: “…if it be so that the earth is a moon, then we are also giddy, vertiginous and lunatic within this sublunary maze” (Johnson, 1934, p. 41). In his The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature Proved by Natural Reason, Godfrey Goodman, who was at the center of this melancholy mood, put forward the argument that the cosmos had entered an irreversible period of decay. By falling from our original noble state, decay is defined as a mark of imperfection. The assertion is made against the backdrop of an age, the arrival of which was too late for the Renaissance, too early for the Enlightenment, and beleaguered by an apocalyptic proliferation of pestilence, plague, and disease. In the poems of John Donne, we find a recurrent sense of media in vita in morte: life as a living death. In Donne’s evaluation, the plagues that swept across Europe were due to the decaying of the world. Physical illness, to which the poet was frequently prone, was viewed as a preface toward eventual dissolution. Hence, the certainty of death was more than an abstraction. Instead, it was something to fear with each moment. The implication of Donne’s view is that decay is as much cosmological as it is sociological. The degeneration of the cosmos thus testified to the degeneration of humanity. He writes:

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So did the world from the first hour decay, That evening was beginning of the day, And now the springs and summer which we see, Like sons of women after fifty be. And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out The sun is lost, and the earth, and man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. Donne, “An Anatomy of the World” (1983, pp. 275–276).

Donne’s melancholy prepares the ground for a consideration of his own memory, mutable and fragmented. Because of this temporal anxiety, the still image becomes the measure of passing time, and thus decay. “Two weeks before his death,” Jonathan Dollimore tells us in his excellent study of mutability and desire, “he covered himself in his winding-sheet and in that posture had his portrait painted and then hung by his bed” (Dollimore, 1999, p. 71). Like that mournful dandy Dorian Gray, in Donne, a strange and pessimistic fusion between narcissism and melancholy materializes. Wilde writes: It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crows’ feet would creep round the fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross, as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body (Wilde, 1930, p. 171).

Elsewhere, Donne confronts the transience that exists after death, as the body becomes the space for the motion of decomposition. For Dollimore, Donne’s sensitivity toward decay gives rise to a “pervasive yearning for stasis” (Dollimore, 1999, p. 74). Stasis establishes a center, a space from which the erosion of things can be viewed. Because the preserved margin of aesthetic distance is undermined by an exposure to constant becoming, Donne’s poetry hovers between sublimity and the dissolute: This is Nature’s nest of Boxes; The Heavens contain the Earth, the Earth, Cities, Cities, Men. And all these are Concentric; the common center to them all is decay, ruin….Annihilation (cited in Dollimore, 1999, p. 75).

Donne’s repetitious employment of words seems to mirror the desire for stasis in the midst of erosion. Cities take place on the earth. Yet the earth is not static, but revolving. The discoveries of Copernicus created a context in which vertiginousness shadowed the claim to certainty and rational clarity. In place of certainty, we discover a “concentric” pull toward the space forged in

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the absence of reason, and thus marked by the annihilating force of decay. Only now, the center is absent. What is being annihilated in Donne’s effective passage is the enclosed “boxes” of nature, hitherto delimited and domesticated by reason. Under this atmosphere of thick melancholy, the ruin becomes an object of aesthetic contemplation. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the ruin was used as an ornamental motif, encouraged by the Renaissance’s rediscovery of Rome. When painters such as Monsu F. Desiderio and the Italian painter Salvator Rosa emerged, however, the ruin became a legitimate object of contemplation. With Rosa, we find the heroic landscapes of Nicolas Poussin and Claude replaced by an emphasis on the imperfections of nature. For Rosa, the mode of affirmation is challenged by rugged landscapes, fallen rocks, and withered hermits. In his “Democritus in Meditation” 1650 (Fig. 2), we find broken urns and hems, with skulls of goats, decayed busts, and a fallen tree. In the middle of the painting sits Democritus, his hands supporting his head. Rosa’s painting concludes in an impasse of wisdom. The tranquil countenance of the classical philosopher has been replaced by melancholic inertia, symbolized by a decayed and fermented landscape. Rosa writes: All our works fall and sicken, Nothing is eternal: The Colossei dies, the Baths, The worlds are dust, their pomp a nothingness. Rosa (cited in Woodward, 2001, p. 91)

With Rosa, the aesthetic consideration of decay is transformed from pious degradation into a memento mori that would later be personified in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a fashionable vanitas motif. While Romanticism flourished, a new sensibility toward ruin developed, characterized by a yearning for the “beyond.” The trope of the “beyond” entailed an exotic image, able to counter the rise of industrialism and supposed progress. Under this heady atmosphere, a proclivity for decay was seen as “a mark of aesthetic sensitivity for many aristocratic Europeans” (cited in Roth et al., 1997, p. 3).

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Figure 2: Salvator Rosa, “Democritus in Meditation,” 1650. Courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst.

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In the gardens of Europe, artificial ruins, engineered by aesthetes to imitate fallen relics, quickly emerged. The Chinese pagodas, mausoleums, eroded arches, and faux mosques in Kew Gardens, England, all designed by Williams Chambers, exemplify the disjoined appeal of the artificial ruin. In Virginia Water, Surrey, thirty-seven columns of Roman ruin, originally in the British Museum, London, now stand alongside green lawns and sweet tea. The nineteenth century aesthetic treatment of the ruin correlated mortality with nature and human existence. The traveler William Gilpin writes, “a ruin is a sacred thing, rooted for ages in soil; assimilated to it; and becoming, as it were, part of it; we consider it as a work of nature, rather than of art” (Ibid., p. 7). For this reason, we find Joseph Gandy, associate of Sir John Soane, depicting the Bank of England as a gnawed ruin (Fig. 3). Here, we find a sentiment wavering between idealism and melancholy. Romanticized by inaccessible remoteness, had Gandy known that the Bank of England would become a demolished ruin, his sentiment might have altered. By viewing Gandy’s painting as an idealized image, the early nineteenth century aesthetic reveals itself as a continuation of the aristocratic penchant for artificial ruins. Because of this mode of aestheticization within aesthetic contemplation, the ruin remained fractional to the subject and so limited itself to “picturesque decay.” “I love above all,” writes Flaubert in a familiar passage, “the sight of vegetation resting upon old ruins; this embrace of nature, coming swiftly to bury the work of man the moment his hand is no longer there to defend, fills me with deep and ample joy”(cited in Roth, 1997, p. 271). By being preserved as a synthetic artifice, the fondness for the ruin increases. Because the ruin remains inert, it occupies the perfect position of verging toward dissolution, yet not entirely sliding into it. Temporally static, the external view of the ruin is confirmed by the unnatural preservation that grounds the object. Despite admiring erosion and decrepitude, feeling that the “organic nature of buildings ennobles their wear and tear,” even Ruskin’s exhaustive Stones of Venice failed to establish a unity between the ruin and the subject (cited in Lowenthal, 1985, p. 165). For Ruskin, Venice became a moral allegory. As an aesthetic motif which served a moral end, therefore, decay was embraced: “Irregularity of form, a tension between previous unity and subsequent corrosion, and the prospect of variation through further decay made ruins ideal exemplars of the picturesque” (Ibid., p. 156).

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Figure 3: Joseph Gandy, “View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England in Ruins,” 1798. Courtesy of Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum. The unanimity between the ruin and the subject had yet to be realized. As Romanticism turned to Symbolism, however, the onus on the object was being displaced by an onus on the subject. Already with the landscapes of the late Romantics, we find the focus shifting from impression to expression. As a synthesis between the objective passivity of early Romanticism and the subjective volatility of Symbolism, the German painter Casper David Friedrich crystallizes this transition. In his “The Polar Sea (The Wreck of Hope)” (1823–1824), amid jagged sheaths of ice, a fallen ship lays crushed (Fig. 4). Strands of the ship’s mast gesticulate violently through the ice, while the mountain of ice forms a ruined monument pointing to a cold sky. The significance of Friedrich’s painting is that the ruin no longer derives from an organic origin. Instead, the natural erosion caused by the passing of time is determined by a sudden and violent collision of distinctly human polarities: aspiration and failure. The vanity of effort has been exorcised through devastation, evoking a space of silence. Friedrich knew this silence well. As a child ice-skating on the frozen Baltic, the artist witnessed his brother drown as the ice turned to water. For Friedrich, “The Wreck” is more than an allegory of life’s inevitable horror. Framed by his own dread, Friedrich’s ruin symbolizes time coming undone.

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Figure 4: Caspar David Friedrich, “The Polar Sea,” 1823–1824. Courtesy of Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz. With Friedrich, the ruin ceases to be an object of curious detachment or capricious fancy. It has become a symbol in which subjectivity converges with representation. As verification of this, commenting on Impressionism, Friedrich writes: “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him” (cited in Vaughn, 1972, p. 14). This logic of subjectivism implicates a correspondence denoted, not by the impression the ruin makes on the subject, but by the active content of the subject upon the ruin. For Friedrich, this logic was inspired by post-Hegelian idealism, evident in the likes of Schelling, Novalis, and Fichte. Idealism enabled the artist to render nature his or her own by positing the causal quality of the subjective mind. Despite Friedrich’s Protestantism, the simplistic view associated with the Christian perspective on decay was repugnant for the painter. Decay, dissolution, and decline, more than moralistic fables, enabled the possibility of existential affirmation to emerge: “Why, this question is often put to me,” Friedrich writes, “do you choose so often as a subject for painting death, transience, and the grave? In order to live …one must submit oneself to death many times” (Ibid., p. 17). Roused by the words of Novalis—“It was

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death that revealed to us eternal life. You are death and only you make us whole”—Friedrich’s distinctly Heideggerian perspective is echoed in his allusion to crumbling masonry, decayed trees, cracked crosses, fallen rocks, ships returning to port, desolate mountains, and a depiction of his own burial. In a panting like “Winter (Churchyard by the Sea)” (1834), we find, not a morose pre-occupation with the passive resignation of death, but a vivid depiction of life. In the painting, an aged couple sits in front a ruined abbey, the façade of which conceals a flowing river, flanked by two dead trees. A muted light seeps through the ruin, suggesting affirmation in the void. With Friedrich, the idea of the ruin as a moralistic centerpiece is challenged as subjectivity determines the status of the ruin. For the Romantics, a radical distinction between the object of decay and the excluded subject persisted despite withdrawing the ruin from a moral context. That the Romantics recognized the aesthetic merits of decay is not in question. In spite of this, a conceit was maintained, whereby the delusion of an excluded elitism enabled the Romantics to redeem themselves. In nature, the Romantics sought to construct a philosophy free of greed and in harmony with nature, a sentiment shared by de Sade. Against this naturalistic perspective, a new generation of artists and thinkers sought to refine the Romantics’ “base” sensibility and common sense. The Symbolists countered the Rousseauean Savage by expounding a cult of the artificial. Speaking through his character Des Esseintes, the French novelist J.K. Huysmans writes: Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscrapers…in fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery under floodlight; no cascade that cannot be imitated to perfection by hydraulic engineering…there can be no shadow of doubt that with her never-ending platitudes the old crone has by now exhausted the good-humored admiration of all true artists, and the time has surely come for artifice to take place whenever possible (Huysmans, 1968, pp. 36–37).

In turn, nature’s fatigue would become a central point for the Symbolists, of whom Huysmans was a pivotal figure. Against the Romantic tendency for revolt in the face of Imperialism, declaring an optimistic wish in the act, the Symbolists accepted decline, recognizing its conclusion as necessary and inevitable. Thereafter, industry transpires as an object of affirmation which inverts the Romantic concern with nature. The brave new world, shining deceptively toward the end of the nineteenth century, alight with the failed promises of reason and technology, sig-

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nified a reduction of the world that the Symbolists rejected. “Our century is not moving toward either good or evil,” writes Renan accurately, “it is moving toward mediocrity” (cited in Jullian, 1971, p. 121). The Symbolists evaded the prosaic trend toward common sense by employing artifice and imagination. As an example, we find King Ludwig II of Bavaria, patron of Wagner, erecting castles perched on mountaintops, aspiring to overpower the banal by creating an imagined world. Maurice Barrés writes: Ludwig II was a pure idealist and not an artistic voluptuary. The beauty or rather the very meaning of things around him was perceptible to him alone. His castles and furnishings were abstract signs. The paintings he amassed there had no other purpose than to maintain before his eyes the rules and exemplars which inspired him until the dawn (Ibid., p. 243).

That the Symbolists’ idealism was to be supplanted by modernity was inevitable. Though indebted to Symbolism, the subsequent movements of Cubism, Fauvism, Expressionism, and Futurism all marked a return to the “natural” and thus a deviation from the Symbolist preoccupation with the imagination: “It is all too clear,” wrote Gustave Kahn, “that these people move only in search of resources, and the source of dreams is running dry” (cited in Gibson, 1995, p. 11). Gliding toward positivism and modernity, the apocalyptic atmosphere of decline became central to the Symbolists as the mal de siècle emerged as the final exit before the twentieth century. The Symbolists expressed this sense of closure by depicting fallen figures, dissolute nations, and souls paralyzed through a sense of impuissance. As Théophile Gautier writes in his effective description of decadence: The style of decadence is nothing else than art arrived at that extreme point of maturity produced by those civilizations which are growing old with their oblique suns.... We may remind ourselves, in connection with it, of the language of the Later Roman Empire, already mottled with the greenness of decomposition, and, as it were, gamy (faisandée), and of the complicated refinements of the Byzantine school, the last form of Greek art fallen into deliquescence. Such is the inevitable and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where factitious life has replaced the natural life, and developed in man unknown wants (cited in Nordau, 1993, p. 299).

Above all else, Baudelaire ventured toward this new aesthetic by converting the hitherto pejorative sense of the word “decadent” into an accolade. In his brief but notable essay, “Literary Decadence: Artistic Representations of Decay,” Wolfdietrich Rasch describes how Baudelaire’s conversion of the word “decadent” forced the subject of decay to be treated with the same merit as classical literature: “The themes of decay and downfall hencefor-

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ward have the same validity as those of rude, aspiring life and are just as worthy as classical subjects of a place in poetry and literature” (Rasch, 1982, p. 208). Under this newfound inversion of values, we discover postBaudelairean writers gradually pledging their affirmation to decadence. Consider Verlaine: I like the word ‘decadent’…all shimmering with purple and gold…it is made up of carnal spirits and unhappy flesh and of all the violent splendors of the Lower Empire…it conjures the collapse among the flames of races exhausted by the power of feeling, to the invading sound of enemy trumpets (cited in Gilman, 1979, p. 5).

With Baudelaire, decay as something expressive of a particular mood becomes an object to be celebrated as an inherent part of the fragmentation of consciousness and existence. In his Lost Time, David Gross writes thus of Baudelaire: For him, the transience of life is best perceived by attaching oneself to what is falling away, not by latching onto what is new or novel….if one paid no attention to what was coming to an end or had hardly ceased to be, one missed a whole sphere of beauty that called out to be recognized (Gross, 2000, p. 146).

Baudelaire’s renowned poem, “Une Charogne,” is exemplary of this renewed model of aesthetic dissolution, a thought encapsulated in Heraclitus’ avowal of opposites: “Immortal mortals, mortal immortals, living their death, dying their life” (cited in Geldard, 2000, p. 109). For Baudelaire, the motion of lived experience is inseparable from the downward drive of decay. To exclude either would be a denial of life. When Baudelaire contrasts his lover with an inert and putrefied carcass amidst a haze of flies in the final section of “Une Charogne,” morbid fetish has been supplanted by aesthetic unity. The conjunction between putrification and love, so far a taboo, reveals itself as an irreversible necessity: Remember, my love, the object we saw That beautiful morning in June: By a bend in the path a carcass reclined On a bed sown with pebbles and stones Her legs were spread out like a lecherous whore, Sweating out poisonous fumes, Who opened in slick invitational style Her stinking and festering womb.

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•THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY• And the sky cast an eye on this marvelous meat As over the flowers in bloom. The stench was so wretched that there on the grass You nearly collapsed in a swoon And you, in your turn, will be rotten as this: Horrible, filthy, undone, O sun of my nature and star of my eyes, My passion, my angel in one! Baudelaire, “Une Charogne” (1998, p. 59).

After Baudelaire, Nietzsche realized that by embracing fate (amor fati), the necessity of decline, as an object imposed on the subject, could be transformed by the act of will: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it…but love it” (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 714). Nietzsche’s sanguine affirmation of fate, his venture toward la Gaya Scienza, suggests a Stoical recognition of the determinate in the face of nature. In becoming autonomous from nature, Nietzsche enables humanity to empower itself against the natural world: I am a wanderer and a mountain-climber…I do not like the plains and it seems I cannot sit still for long. And whatever may yet come to me as fate and experience— a wandering and a mountain climbing will be in it: in the final analysis one experiences only oneself (Nietzsche, 1969, p. 173).

This recourse to Alpine imagery, mountain peaks, and thin air is more than hyperbole. As a sporadic invalid, Nietzsche’s overcoming of nature was as much a will-to-health as it was a will-to-power. The affirmation of fate, together with his doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, is at the center of Nietzsche’s profoundly vitalistic philosophy. Knowing that the desire to will remains possible in spite of suffering, chronic illness is thus seen as a “necessary color within such a superfluity of light” (Ibid., p. 176). Decline gives richness to life and renders the inanimate animate. The alchemical transformation of dross to gold requires the adept to be burnt before being distilled. For Nietzsche, absorption in lived experience is a requisite before experience can be overcome: “I am décadent,” he writes not long before his madness, but, “I am also its antithesis” (Nietzsche, 2000, p. 723). Having divorced decline from its depreciatory overtones, the fin de siècle tradition of decay was not immune to counter-attack. While Baudelaire had achieved the task of rendering decay aesthetical, that the term “degeneracy” would follow was not unsurprising. Rasch writes, “The frank avowal of

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pleasure at the experience of decline, and of a love of decay, has a disturbing effect, inspiring rejection and irritation” (Rasch, 1982, p. 209). Exemplary of this irritation is Max Nordau’s remarkable fin de siècle polemic Degeneration. For Nordau, an optimistic Darwinian, degeneration was a morbid deviation from a normative mode of predetermined order, as outlined by the natural sciences. This, in turn, would translate as a dogmatic adherence to tradition and an unmovable faith in progress, by which Nordau means the evolutionary march of science. Such a march presupposes absolute clarity with regard to cause and effect, since to disregard causal properties would mean discounting the laws of nature. The mystical, allegoric, and allusive thus become degenerative par excellence. Coupled with this social diagnosis, decay and decline fall into the category of degenerative, contesting, Nordau suggests, rational order. Consequently, in Nordau’s evaluation, the fin de siècle becomes abhorrent. We read: It is the impotent despair of a sick man, who feels himself dying by inches in the midst of an eternally living nature blooming insolently forever. It is the envy of a rich, hoary voluptuary, who sees a pair of young lovers making for a sequestered forest nook; it is the mortification of the exhausted and impotent refugee from a Florentine plague, seeking in an enchanted garden the experience of a Decamerone, but striving in vain to snatch one more pleasure of sense from the uncertain hour (Nordau, 1993, p. 3).

Like all of Nordau’s words, the descriptions of the fin de siècle mood, graceful and fluid, confirm rather than debase the aesthetical image in question. Nordau’s lucidity is a disservice to his aims. Despite this, the mood of the fin de siècle endangered Nordau’s confidence in progress and evolution simultaneously. As a result, the diagnosis of degeneration presupposes its remedy. Nordau’s etiology of degeneration is as laudable as it is dubious. By making recourse to Cesare Lombroso’s physiognomy, Nordau is able to posit the existence of “stigmatic” evidence: “deformities, multiple and stunted growths in the first lines of asymmetry, the unequal development of the two halves of the face and cranium...squint-eyes, harelips, irregularities in the position of the teeth...webbed or supernumerary fingers” (Ibid., p. 17). Dismissing Nordau’s claims outright would be a miscalculation. By pursuing the line of thought, Nordau’s argument implicates its own ruin. Let us examine the account of Baudelaire: He died of general paralysis, after he had wallowed for months in the lowest depths of insanity...but even if no such horrible end had protracted the diagnosis from all attack, there would be no doubt as to its accuracy, seeing that Baudelaire showed all the mental stigmata of degeneration during the whole of his life (Ibid., p. 285).

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After deriding Baudelaire, Nordau proceeds to exhort him, quoting his poetry at length while simultaneously identifying what is degenerate. Baudelaire’s repulsion of nature, fervor for the diseased and deformed, and yearning for the inert all emerge as symptoms of the degenerate. To Nordau’s error, he limits his analysis of the fin de siècle as an expression of revolt and not a recognition of decline. Nordau’s vilification of Baudelaire is based upon the belief that the poet is immoral and perverse. In Nordau’s understanding, perversion is a deviation from a normative status evident in natural law. In relation to Baudelaire, this correlation is erroneous. Baudelaire’s pessimism does not discount natural law: it acknowledges it. Recalling the fate of the Roman Empire, the fin de siècle evokes antithetical views. While Baudelaire submits to nature, Nordau is unable to reconcile history with progress. Because of this tension, Nordau’s faith in science is reinforced, the dogma stiffened. From a temporal vantage point, Baudelaire was manifestly right. His prophetic depiction of suffering, determined by the impression of decline, captures an exhausted society anticipating the extinguished optimism of the twentieth century. These images were entirely accurate. History has denounced the optimist, while the desire to “cleanse” society of degeneracy has led to genocide. The fear and pessimism behind the fin de siècle have been warranted. Venturing to reason the world in terms of cause and effect, rational science has evoked a generic pluralism consisting of spurious utopias, each of which denies the indeterminate. The ineffable has been conquered. Replacing it, the “why” has been converted to a “how.”

III Max Nordau had sought to overpower fin de siècle pessimism with hard rationalism. In realizing that the mood of the fin de siècle exceeds a subjective condition, Nordau adhered to a positivistic stance with greater conviction. By the twentieth century, the position that Nordau espoused would signify an intolerable, nostalgic, and regressive pursuit of the pernicious “ideal.” Replacing his theory of degeneration, we find rational optimism contested by pessimistic fatalism. In Oswald Spengler’s momentous but now neglected The Decline of the West, a revised conception of history and progress is conceived, which challenges linearity and rationality. As with the eighteenth century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, Spengler’s account of history does not adhere to a process of gradual evolution whereby subsequent epochs or forms (Gestalt)

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proceed to perfect the former. For Spengler, any such account of history is framed by an egocentric view: Mankind appears to me as a zoological quantity. I see no progress, no goal, no avenue for humanity, except in the heads of the Western progress-Philistines.... I cannot see a single mind and even less a unity of endeavors, feelings, and understandings in these barren masses of people (Spengler, 2000, p. 147).

In Spengler’s view, the narrative of history is unrelated, cyclical, and limited by growth and decline, and therefore “morphological.” Spengler identifies eight “High Cultures”: the Indian, the Babylonian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Mexican, the Arabian, the Classical, and the EuropeanWestern. Each culture carries a distinct “prime symbol” which serves as the focus of that culture. The Faustian Soul, being the prime symbol of the European-Western culture, is characterized by a will-to-power and a desire for the infinite. Spengler’s natural history of decline enables him to predict the temporal age of each stage. In the midst of its “Civilization” phase, marked by strife, decadence, and indulgence, the West is determined by the coming of the Caesars, being an end of democracy and the arrival of despotic imperialism. Spengler’s anticipation of Hitler, whom he remained vehemently opposed to despite an unwelcome Nazi endorsement, is uncanny. For Spengler, the arrival of Hitler marked a violent end of the end, rather than the beginning of the end. When the role of the machine supplanted the human during the Industrial Revolution, social and political decline was established. Humanity sought to better itself through economic development. In doing so, humanity exhausted the democratic and socialist principles originally desired, so inviting totalitarianism to the door: “through money democracy destroys itself, after money has destroyed the spirit” (Spengler, 1991, p. 582). Despite their divisions, Nordau and Spengler’s diagnosis of the West is bleak. Nordau remains optimistic while reason falters. Spengler, conversely, is fatalistic in relation to decline. Who had conceded? Correlating Spengler’s pessimism to the discordant close of the First World War and Nordau’s optimism to an age still trusting in science simplifies but does not explain the dichotomy. With Nordau, mortality opposes itself as history fails to fulfill its potential. With Spengler, Nietzsche’s amor fati repeats itself: the Symbolists desire for the exotic exhausts itself as world history begins to fall.

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IV Out of this dialectical synthesis between Nordau and Spengler, the contemporary concern of cultural pessimism arises. What this pessimism signifies is recognition of the gradual collapse of environmental, economic, political, and sociological factors, whereby faith in progress is disillusioned by historical experience. Cultural pessimism marks the end of rational faith in history and collective politics as apathy and cynicism replace harmony and trust. Withdrawal from the collective means that success is replaced by subjectivism and individualism. Because of this subjectivist position, the normative foundations of reason, previously identified with a metaphysical absolute, are able to be determined by weak criteria secured through emotivism. The bond between emotion and epistemic certainty, which has replaced Platonic foundationalism, distinguishes itself as traditional rationality loses influence. Today, the decision to go to war is decided by intuition and not experience. So long as intuition is consistent with emotion, then the grounds for moral certainty are secured. Because of this variable criterion, politics deems itself immune to judgment despite explicit opposition. New Age “thought,” which flourished during the Millennium before being consigned to “specialist bookstores,” manipulates this loose rationality by compounding esotericism with introversion. The supposed destruction of the Cartesian subject is attained as a homogenous impression of individuality is put forward. Under the aegis of the New Age, the human being becomes collectively identified with an already fixed image of individualism. Because of this renunciation of autonomy, carried out in the New Age “cult,” the non-self is obliterated. As a result, New Age thinking is destructive to progressive decline because it administers a nullifying effect upon thought by presenting the veneer of harmony through the guise of a malformed mysticism. As New Ageism is relegated to spiritual ineptitude, cultural pessimism continues to thrive while cynicism exploits the end of the absolute. Through the mode of cynical thought, Postmodernist irony is employed to disarm the fate of decline. The cynic is removed from the process by becoming a detached voyeur to decline. In turn, the cynic fulfills the nineteenth century role of the urban flâneur. The position of critical engagement, originally a tool to dispute claims of rationality, morphs into a posture of affected scorn and uncritical opposition by habit. Speaking about New York, Baudrillard is insightful: “It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism, and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence, and yet I cannot help but feel it has about it something of the dawning of the universe” (Baudrillard, 1988, p. 23).

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In the context of cultural pessimism, the failure of democratic politics is compounded by mistrust in political motives. Political aspiration wavers as progressive advancements in empirical and statistical data are put forward as the measure of success. The bond between cultural pessimism and “civilized,” democratic nations is logical and repeated in the model of science. By explaining the casual factors determining how culture has fallen, science exceeds its epistemological scope by imprinting a sense of incompletion onto the world. The desire to know the “how” of things, initiated by science, leaves the “why” of things irresolute. By knowing the “how” of things, however, consolation is provided with the ability to alter the configuration of those things. To appease the human demand for progress, readapting nature mirrors the rise of rationality. The consequence of this adaptation, however, is disastrous. Andrew Solomon writes: We are consuming the production of the earth at a frightening pace, sabotaging the land, sea, and sky. The rain forest is being destroyed; our oceans brim with industrial waste; the ozone layer is depleted. There are far more people in the world than there ever have been before, and next year there will be even more, and the year after that there will be many more again. We are creating problems that will trouble the next generation, and the next, and the next after that. Man has been changing the earth ever since the first flint knife was shaped from a stone and the first seed was sowed by an Anatolian farmer, but the pace of alteration is now getting severely out of hand (Solomon, 2001, pp. 30–31).

The fin de siècle spirit endures through the appearance of ecology and empiricism. Pre-scientific faith developed hope in the renewal of the world. After science, however, the desire for a naturalistic world is undermined. The dialectic of Symbolism, between the Ideal and the pragmatic, is no longer applicable, since the validation of decline has been confirmed empirically, so closing the dialectic. With this verification of decline, cynicism reaches its limits as unguarded recognition proves itself to be the necessary perspective. If progress and decline are to be consistent, acknowledging the imperative of outward contradiction in the conjunction, any such retrospective redemption must be questioned.

V With the emergence of cultural pessimism, we are no longer enquiring into a historical narrative that is able to be viewed from a detached vantage point. The present is at hand and our history of decay is complete. With this closure, a sense of the indeterminate emerges. If Spengler was right to diagnose the twentieth century as the age of Caesarism, then the epilogue continues

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today as boundaries between appearance and reality come undone while the content of old thought dissolves. Silvestrov: “At least, an epilogue is like the gathering of resonances, a form which is open—not at the end, as would be more usual, but at the beginning. Basically, I see epilogation as a particular state of culture” (Silvestrov, 1995, p. 6). In the spatial coda, the creation of the aesthetic idea materializes. We seek to assert the future of decline through aesthetic contemplation, so establishing a bond between subject and object. In a post-rational existence, the task of affirming the manifestation of decline is critical. As a result of this affirmation, the Nothing, being the conjunction between silence and decline, the embodiment of ontological process ascribable to specific temporal forms, thereafter becomes tangible. Let us continue our study by examining the aesthetics of decay in greater detail.

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An Uncanny Place: Modern Ruins Nothing is miserable unless it has feelings. A ruined house is not; man alone is miserable. Pascal (1973, p. 41)

I Through undermining the claim to reason, cultural pessimism gives rise to a desire to compensate for a culture already in decline. The result of this desire is an indeterminate yet inextricable bond between pessimism and the rate of consumption. The more severe the pessimism, the greater the demand for expenditure. Knowing that a culture is in decline, we find an increase in consumerism. Disclosed in this ratio is a pillaging mentality, which strives toward the veiling of the temporal present as that moment reveals itself for what it is. Schopenhauer remarks rightly: “Money is human happiness in abstracto; and so the man who is no longer capable of enjoying such happiness in concreto sets his whole heart on money” (Schopenhauer, 2000, p. 590). The final days of Rome expose the unthinking inclination toward consumerism determined by proximity to ruin. After the fall, compensation, itself a vulgar and arbitrary concept, manifests itself as the desire to plunder the remains of grandeur. In contrast, the nineteenth century predilection toward aesthetic pessimism excluded any consideration of compensation, Nietzsche’s Dionysian revelry the logical outcome of this aesthetic movement. On the tide of the first Industrial Revolution, pessimism and capitalism had yet to fuse. Because of this autonomy, pessimism was able to gain an aesthetic quality. In our age, however, the merger between consumption and pessimism has become synonymous with our late capitalist, post-industrial culture. This dynamic between cultural pessimism—a world conscious of its decline—and a world still hungry for survival by capitalist consumption is especially evident in the last four decades of the twentieth century. As expansion cultivates the mood of economic progress, industrial relocation takes precedence. Thereafter, industry, commerce, and capitalism root themselves in transience. Derelict shops, once a fixed site, are soon reconfigured to erase, often negate, their past. The success of the capitalist vocation depends upon its reliance on short-term prospects, a disregard toward sentiment, and an affirmation of the progressive outlook, by which we infer the illusion of

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motion. Because of this method, architecturally imposing places of labor withdraw into obscurity as capitalism flourishes. The supposed second Industrial Revolution of the early twentieth century, now ousted by a global community driven by information technology, has meant that places of labor and craft, originally housed in factories and broader communities, have been rendered superfluous. Replacing the old structures, inconspicuous spaces emerge that evoke neither failure nor success. Instead of demonstrating economic growth in terms of spatial occupancy, the capitalist logic now demonstrates it in abstraction. As capital develops, the sites of previous activity, unable to exploit the profit of capitalism, lie dormant on the urban landscape. The process mirrors the seizing of monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII. Left to decay, some monasteries were converted into houses (Byron’s Newsted Abby is a celebrated illustration), while others became cathedrals or parish churches. Of those that remained, their innards were gutted, and their stained glass, bells, and pews sold to bidders who reduced those compounds to their base elements. The majority of the monasteries, however, lay abandoned, eroding under the elements as nature reclaimed them. Likewise, in the age of capitalism and cultural pessimism, we witness once-active factories, hospitals, prisons and other institutional structures abandoned due to their redundant function or otherwise decommissioned, consigning them to the useless. In Ernst Bloch’s phrase, such sites become “hollow spaces of capitalism” (Bloch, 1988, p. 186). In a book written in the 1960s detailing the rise of dereliction, John Barr laments a future in which dormant industries produce a rise in disused buildings: “Dereliction—so closely associated with the nineteenth century industrial revolution—is actually increasing during our century of technological revolution” (Barr, 1969, p. 13). Barr’s prognosis was correct, his book prophetic. For Barr, despite the twentieth century’s “change of heart” with regard to a sense of community responsibility, pervasive greed toward profit and apathy “toward quality of environment” still persists. Failing to realize the significance of the abandoned structure, Barr is disparaging toward dereliction and does not, we discover, appreciate the grandiose sight of a “splendid spoil heap.” Convinced that industrial dereliction subverts natural law, so leading to economic decline, Barr’s book consists of a pragmatic agenda to restore sites of dereliction while regenerating the surrounding environment: Areas of high industrial spoliation come to an unhappy concatenation of events: dereliction contributes to the exodus of worker and of modern industries already established there, and dereliction also discourages other modern industries from com-

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ing...derelict land sours its surroundings. A spoil tip threatens a much larger area than that on which it perches like some vile bird of prey (Ibid., p. 35).

Barr’s concern, symbolic of a broader resistance against decline, is warranted. Structural dereliction has grown in accordance with capitalist production, so quickening that dereliction. However, Barr’s failure to acknowledge the import of dereliction in a meta-historic framework means that his analysis of the derelict remains partial and polemic. By situating the process of decay against the growth of capital, Barr interrupts dereliction by striving to restore the site. With that interruption, the ontological resonance of the ruin is undermined as a rational agenda prevails. The ruin as a symbol of progressive temporality is only possible when the process is realized through completion. By intervening in the ruin, politically or culturally, the movement is delayed, but not crushed. As I will argue in the final chapter, ethically, the future of the ruin can only be spoken of in terms of it actively disbanding.

II The cyclical nature of capitalism, whereby new industries suggest rational progress, but only at the expense of destroying old industries, entails a reworking of space in which disorder and mutability are suppressed. Here, we pass from a consideration of political motivation to one concerning the phenomenology of space, which I will now consider. The space of capitalism is marked by an unambiguous tension between space and place. If we say that space is where place occurs, then place becomes individuated and particular. Unlike space, which is geometrically defined and homogenous, place is local. The locality of place binds it to a delimited value. In general, the place of our childhood contains a set of features that prevent it from losing its place in time. We live in and remember places, because the particularity of place defines our temporal dwelling, and so our continuous identity. Hence, displacement from place results in temporal and spatial disorientation. No longer being in place, as Heidegger and Bachelard taught, reveals ontological insecurity, since ontology is rooted in the central place of being. For Edward Casey, “to be is to be bounded by place, limited by it” (Casey, 1993, p. 15). In Casey’s exceptional contribution to the discourse on place, which he deems is a topic that was suppressed until the emergence of twentieth century phenomenology, place encloses being, revealing a “somatocentric perspective” in which place and the body align (Casey, 1997, p. 237). Against a “space prejudiced” framework, Casey puts forward an account of “the power of place” which seeks to reclaim the centrality of place.

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The becoming of place from space is marked by an individuation of space. Space loses its isotropic quality by being inhabited, and thus embodied and emplaced between the body and the landscape (Casey, 1993, pp. 28–29). “Place,” Casey writes, “is what takes place between body and landscape” (Ibid.). The experiential quality of place secures the involvement of the body in place. Being in place, the geometrical homogeneity of space is displaced by a directionality of place. Place, Casey observes, contains dimensions that position the body. Near and far, left and right, are such with reference to the body, which is experientially and immediately “here.” Can we infer that every space, even the most uninhabitable and remote, even the most transient, must submit to the category of place? The answer, prima facie, appears positive. The determination of place fulfills the logic of spatial becoming. Being geometrically defined, space forces itself against its own limitations, expending its universality while encountering the bordering locality of place. Once the desert—the original space—was abandoned, it gave itself over to the history of lived experience. In conjunction with the limits of space, deferred only by intervention, the conferment of names on space reinforces the establishment of place. Placenames withdraw a space from abstraction by situating it in a particular context. The “zones” demarcating militarized areas, themselves anti-places, undergo a partial renewal through the restoration of their original place-names. Of course, the ascription is tenuous, and war is conducted on a battleground marked by the struggle over the reclamation of a territorial name. The reinstatement of space is thus synonymous with renewal and victory. The renewal is possible because the superimposition of place-names is artificial. The delimitation of place is revocable through restoration. If civil wars rage over and in landscape, then the reversal of place becomes possible. Thus, an attachment to this hope is conceived by those exiled from their native place. For this reason, displacement entails an ambivalent relationship to the original place. Caution is taken not to confer a name upon anti-place prematurely. In spite of this caution, the naming of space is prehistoric, since dwelling depends on the borders of place. As the spacious void of non-place gains the distinction of familiarity, estrangement becomes domesticated. The transition to place, however, exposes place to its end. Whereas war reconfigures place, temporal distance follows the process of reconfiguration by losing place. As I have argued in Chapter Six, the vitality of place in lived experience risks radical alteration as our memories fail to reconcile with the erosion and mutability of place. Place moves on, necessarily. Losing sight of that movement, we become entangled with an unreal place, solipsistically preserved by

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the remembering consciousness, which, in the absence of that place, laments its loss. Discussing Freud’s account of mourning, Casey claims it “may be extended to apply to the abandonment of places with which we have become bonded and which we have been forced to leave, often so abruptly that we have not been able to anticipate the consequences in any salutary way” (Ibid., p. 198). The emergence of “place-cathexes” positions us in a mode of mourning. The place no longer exists. And yet the recognition fails to mark the end of that place. We continue to exist where the place was, while the place continues to exist where we are. The logic of melancholy, ancient and unyielding, converges as the clarity of fixed place falls into oblivion. In the remains of place, we discover a halfway house, situated between place and non-place. Place withdraws in isolation, and this is why we speak of empty space and not empty places. The return to past places testifies to this loss. Being lost in place means finding ourselves in undiscovered space. An explicitly uncanny border, located in the discrepancy between place and time, instills the creation of a new place from the ruins of the old one. In the return, we do not witness the death of place, now present as a dead zone of motionlessness. Instead, the old place morphs, often uneasily, into what it has since become. A rebirth has taken place, only now our memories are no longer part of that place. Now, we are looking as outsiders onto the scattered remnants of a once familiar place annihilated by time. Returning, we make recourse to an original discovery of place. Yet it is a discovery that having already being lived once is disrupted, the possibility of spontaneous experience damaged. Let us return to Casey’s analysis of abundant place before considering how ruins contest the ordered space of capitalism. The particular dimensionality of place, coupled with its distinct features, means that place is memorable and memory-containing. We recognize this in how place forges a complex network of memories in consciousness. Indeed, for Casey, memory is always in place: “To be placeless in one’s remembering is not only to be disoriented; it is to be decidedly advantaged with regard to what a more complete mnemonic experience might deliver. Place serves to situate one’s memorial life, to give it ‘a name and a local habitation’” (Casey, 2000, pp. 183–184). Casey’s exposition of the memorability of place-world is marked by the tense encroachment of homogenous space, which threatens to undo the cultivation of place. In distinction to place, Casey considers the role of “site,” which he defines as “place as leveled down to metrically determinate divisions” (Ibid., p. 184). In site, the dimensionality of place is absent. Instead, we are confronted with a homogenous and exposed anti-place configured in terms of “cartographic representations” (Ibid., p. 185). The presence of site is not spatially limited to a “zone,” but “triumphing” over place.

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Casey’s reading of the emergence of site occurs as place is posited in a relative manner. After Descartes, the relativity of place takes precedence. The geometrically established layout of site means that “the variegations or obtrusions that aid in remembering unsited places” are absent (Ibid., pp. 185– 186). Unable to contain memory, site thus becomes an inhabitable place. The “indifferent building lot” falls from place by being easily confused with other lots. Because of this confusion between sites, memory falters. In Getting Back to Place, Casey writes: A site is no place to be, much less to remain…once there, moreover, where are we? We are in the midst of a desert of shops, a wasteland of services, a chaos of commerce. If not nowhere, we are in an extremely shallow somewhere (Casey, 1993, p. 268–269).

Casey’s negative depiction of site reappears in the space of capitalism. Only here, the universal homogeneity of spacious site is affirmed, not denied. Before putting capitalism in space, let us recall in passing how progress defines the working of capitalism and contributes to its spatial configuration. Concerning ourselves with spatial extension of post-industrial capitalism, we confront the globalization of space whereby geometrical distance is overruled by information technology. Where bureaucracy once secured the success of modernist capitalism, today, information technology, replacing Weber’s model, means that the spatial centrality of production has been displaced. The destruction of bureaucracy thus entails that the chain of work is broken down. In its place, there are short-term prospects that adapt to the flexibility of the market. This new model of capitalism demotes the expanse of spatiality and replaces it with the compression of time. The raising of temporality, evident in the capitalist space as the temporary “contract,” does not dispense with the idea of singular and continuous progress. Instead, it affirms it. Multinationalism, with which late capitalism is now synonymous, actualizes this continuity by creating a single identity irrespective of spatial divisions. Yet the spatial counterpart of capitalism is essential to that identity. The spatial identity of capitalism is twofold. Firstly, because of the mode of short-term prospects inherent in late capitalism, capitalist space is no longer obliged to rely on spatial permanence, and thus the creation of place. Instead, impermanency and standardization come to represent the evasion of temporal contingency. As a result of this suppression of place, becoming attached to the center of place is impossible while the reconfiguration of future space is prioritized. Units, terminals, and other placeless zones create a uniformity that enforces the presentation of progress despite the essentially volatile undercurrent of capitalism. In conjunction with the impermanence of

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space, the second aspect of the capitalist space derives from its universality. A space that is impermanent is able to avoid being situated in place. The delimiting borders of the place-world, which would literally bind capitalist space to a specific value, are delivered under the capitalist logic. A placeless space becomes atemporal, and so universal, by excluding alterity. With that excess in universality, the remnants of place, which by their nature are temporally particular, are discarded. Capitalist space is temporally clean. The lack of alterity entails an absence of history. Thus, new land, named “the plot,” correlates with the impression of rational and progressive growth by being stripped of its contingent attributes, so returning it to a faceless and placeless origin. Before I position the place of the ruin alongside the space of capitalism, let us move beyond the interior of capitalist space to discover how the ordering of homogenous and placeless space extends to the urban landscape more broadly. In that the space of capitalism actively resists the incarnation of place, Casey’s term “site” is apposite. The capitalist site, compressed temporally by information technology, exceeds enclosed space by constituting the ordered matrix of the urban landscape. Thus, we turn to the city as site, homogenous and absolute. The war on place, evident in the glossed-over and hollowed-out remains that order the (post)modern city with the stamp of rationality, intensifies as the climate of “terror” imposes restrictions on movement. The suppression of movement coincides with the imposition of fixed rationality. Disproving the image of the city as absolute, we find the aleatoric threat of particularity and contingency. Thus, in place of the particular, the aplatial city reduces space to bare existence. Because of this vilification of disorder, the city adheres to a formal and tacit matrix in which dissimilarity becomes ever vaguer. The city as comprised of zones, blocks, and lots marks the conquest of site. Describing this tension, architect Michael Sorkin writes: This ‘place’ is fully ageographic: it can be inserted equally in an open field or in the heart of town; the inward-looking atrium hotel is as apt to the featureless greensward as it is to teeming unreclaimed downtowns. With its components reduced to a repetitive minimum, space is departicularized (Sorkin, 1992, p. xxxi).

Sorkin’s analysis identifies the disconnection the city-site has from its context. The destruction of place creates a mutation reconstituted by the fragments of a past now emptied of its contents. Now, shadows and replicas mark a presence once occupied. A site is thus affected, a space deliberately cultivated in order achieve an end. In itself, this does not devalue the notion of space, despite Casey’s criticisms. Indeed, the resistance against site only

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becomes tenable when such a space is employed as an instrument of enforcement. As I have written elsewhere, phenomenologically, the site affords the possibility of lived experience, and thus the creation of memory (Trigg, 2006, pp. 5–10). In the city-site, however, we confront a faceless and placeless space, which stifles experience. The facelessness of the city is literally (dis)embodied in that communication no longer relies on face-to-face interaction. In Paul Virilio’s description of the “overexposed city,” the screen and terminal erases but reconfigures spatial depth (Virilio, 1997, pp. 382–383). Virilio’s account of the dissolution of the platial city follows the change of “originary enclosures,” whereby the question of, “at which moment does the city show us its face?” remains unanswerable (Ibid., p. 382). The absence of clear boundaries exposes the city to anxiety and uncertainty; despite its rational ordering, “the architectonic elements begins to drift and float in an electronic ether, devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in the singular temporality of an instantaneous diffusion” (Ibid., p. 383). Thereafter, Virilio’s “electronic topology” of platial disintegration creates a disembodied “antipodal place,” whereby “ghost-towns” are forged as the middle classes flee (Ibid., pp. 384–385). The evacuation is compounded as “speed distance” which “defies temporal and physical measurements” causes the obliteration of place to intensify. Virilio’s evocation of the city as territorial zones now divested of platial distinctions, hitherto identified as elemental in the construction of a “sense of place,” paradoxically encloses space by exposing it. Instead of liberating the domesticated boundaries of defined place, the exposure means that space closes down as new boundaries, evident in surveillance and regulation, flourish. In the city-site, the end of place marks the beginning of an artificial space in which the bond between the organic and the synthetic ruptures. Such a suppression of the organic aspect of space is consistent with a postindustrial capitalist perspective. The pursuit of an atemporal, aplatial zone forces capitalism away from lived place into an unreal and delimited site, so much so that Virilio is prepared to consider “the twilight of place.” In his recent City of Panic, Virilio writes, “And so, after twilight, that shadowline that separates day from night, the ultimate frontier between the desert of the full and the desert of the cosmic void, surges up. This is the twilight of places where, one by one, all the markers of position and composition of apparent velocities disappear” (Virilio, 2004, pp. 116–117). Away from the horizontality of place, the spatial-site aspires upward. About this annihilation of platial rootedness, Spengler writes insightfully: “The Magian and the Faustian souls…built high. Their dream-images became concrete as vaultings above significant inner-spaces, structural antici-

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pations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis” (Spengler, 2000, p. 128). Numerical abstraction, as Spengler reminds us, enforces a necessity which technology is instrumental in creating. The creation of an unreal space beyond the realms of the earth is also recognized in Virilio’s prediction of the city in orbit: “With inhabited satellites, space shuttles and space stations as floating laboratories of high-tech research and industry, architecture is flying high, with curious repercussions for the fate of postindustrial societies…” (Virilio, 1997, p. 388).

III Despite the subversion of platial boundaries by the city-site, a polarity persists between above and below, far and near, and here and there. The city-site is in flight, defensive against intrusion, and vigilant over particularity. Bachelard’s Jungian analysis of the psychological dimensions of the house insightfully reveals the similar escape into the loft. Whereas the basement cellar comes to represent the primordial unconsciousness, the “dark entity of the house, the one that partakes of subterranean forces,” the escape into the attic presents the impression of autonomy: “In the attic, fears are easily “rationalized”….in the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night. In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls” (Bachelard, 1994, pp. 18–19). The rationalizing of space mediates with formlessness. Thus, fictional horror, but also psychological horror, compels consciousness toward a fixed image. Reason ties down the unformed by superimposing an existing image upon it. The cellar becomes a place as objects define its identity, while the instillation of “the same light everywhere” homogenizes dark territory (Ibid., p. 19). Yet the domestication of the dark space, led by synthetic manipulation, falters as the repressed energy returns: “But the unconscious cannot be civilized. It takes a candle when it goes to the cellar” (Ibid.). Outside of the domestic house, the flight into the elsewhere, mirroring Bachelard’s “dark entity,” is catalyzed by the coming of the ruin, disordering the conventions of space as it conceives a radically disruptive mode of place. Were the city-site a self-contained unit, ontologically stable, it would have no desire to enclose itself. Hypersensitive to anti-space, however, the city-site increasingly relies on a homogenous template in order to cancel out the place of negation. Yet in the insistence on rational space, the city-site neglects those places that once constituted a previous rational configuration, having now disproved that configuration by falling into disrepair. As they fall by the

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wayside, and so from the scope of “progress,” modern ruins undo what capitalism sought to put in site. We have dialectically passed through an account of domestic place to the capitalist anti-place, then to the city-site, and now to the ruin. Beyond the city-site, the peculiarity of the ruin is defined in that it demythologizes the impression of seamlessness and linearity. In the ruin, we are at once removed from dichotomized and leveled-down space by entering a place at the threshold of experience. At the threshold, we return to a pre-spatial, if primordial, landscape, yet to submit to the suppression of space and site. Instead, the place of ruin creates protrusions, which desolates the category of clean space. With the realm of desolation, we rejoin Edward Casey, whose insightful analysis of the “arc of desolation” makes clear its centrality in the placeworld. With the aim of clarifying the phenomenology of the ruin-place, I propose to apply Casey’s topology of desolation to the modern ruin. In the region of the city-site, the borders of anti-space are clearly defined, and thus ordered. At the expense of such ordering, the dichotomized spatial categories invite their own dissolution. Central to this binary logic is the distinction between the organic and the synthetic. As we have seen in Virilio’s “overexposed city,” atemporal spatiality dissuades the emergence of the particular. In concrete terms, the particular counters regulated and ordered space. As a result, a margin is created on the border of space in which particular place is categorized. In the city-site, what falls into the margin is the indeterminate realm of the organic and the discarded, both of which come to embody the “dark entity” of Bachelard’s house. Encountering the margins of space, we thus encounter a decentered place. For Casey, the etymological antecedent of the term “encounter” fortuitously binds with nature; thus, “our encounter with Nature ought to take account of countryside, a landed region no longer regarded as at the margin of our existence but at its very center” (Casey, 1993, p. 187). In between that reclamation of the decentered center, the marginal place—in our case, the modern ruin—invokes the sphere of wilderness and desolation. “Such places,” Casey writes, “are genuinely ‘wild,’ that is, they have not been brought under the modifying and restraining that civilized, settled human existence brings in its train” (Ibid., p. 188). Outside of civilization, the place of wilderness brings us into an “eerie” territory, originally inhabited by “hermits, mad people, wanderers, and ‘savages,’ who threatened to undo the fragile fabric human civilization had begun to weave” (Ibid.). We arrive at a landscape reminiscent of Salvator Rosa’s “Witches at their Incantations” (1646) (Fig. 5). In this scene of wilderness and desolation, Casey’s “ghosts and ghouls, witches and werewolves” inhabit a craggy landscape, lonely and nocturnal. In the center of the painting, a man

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hangs from a decayed tree as rotund witches stir a broth beneath the limp corpse. This image of marginal existence, immanently a threat to the domain of reason, captures the notion of wilderness as undomesticated and otherworldly.

Figure 5: Salvator Rosa, “Witches at their Incantations,” 1646. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London. As outsiders to the wilderness, Casey claims that desolation, a sensation which is coupled with displacement, compels “a special form of despair…a form that has everything to do with displacement from one’s usual habitat” (Ibid., p. 192). Such despair is undoubtedly heightened as relics from the world of civility remind us of the distance between desolation and civilization. In the desert, despair is contained so long as the arid emptiness becomes a center. During a winter voyage through Death Valley, California, I once encountered a bleak café in the plateau of non-being. The place, which was also a dwelling, was stranded in the low geometry, ambiguously attached to the remnants of the city-site several hundred miles ways. The exposure of convention, rationality, and civility, reinforced the exterior desolation existing outside of the desert café. Contact with human life, moreover, disproves our belief that desolate space is deserted too. At the same time, with that disjunction between desolation and civility, each aspect becomes wholly defined by disclosing what the other lacks. Casey writes: “The desolate is not just one more sharable trait among others, it is an empathetic and revealing trait, which allows us to grasp an entire dimension of wild land that might

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otherwise be closed to us” (Ibid.). As the remnants of a past life slide into the desolate place, so that place resounds in its vast magnetism. The convergence disorders time and space, forging a double intentionality in the act. Now, in the desert, two lives are being experienced simultaneously. Yet memory is fragile. In Death Valley, I was outside of a fixed center, yet the center persisted. The spectral mirage of the past makes a sudden appearance before withdrawing. What I have the termed “the Nothing,” comes about as spatialtemporal divisions disband. The nothingness of the desert, far from a simple absence of being, reveals itself as a terminus into which the past is collected while simultaneously receding. Memory is fragile because it no longer belongs in place. Instead, we witness a final act of convulsion before memory expires. In that convulsion, desolate place comes alive. The desolation of the desert, disordering binary space and encouraging displacement, fulfills its fate in the modern ruin. To be displaced means recognizing the other place as native from where we are displaced. Our displacement thus coincides with an ordered distinction, still maintained. In the modern ruin, the sense of unfamiliarity, uncanniness, and bewilderment converges. What we are displaced from is the burgeoning idea that rational space is central and native to our dwelling. The consummation of displacement testifies to the ruin’s power as it twists our attachment to spatial regulation. Visually, this subversion is played out in the physicality of the ruin’s landscape. Before us, stability and a defined center give way. The disruption of stability takes place in a twofold manner. Firstly, the distortion of form means that navigating from one point to the next becomes precarious. Dead ends begin where space has caved in. The ruin is in a constant process of morphing into multiple configurations. Because of this incessant flux, regulating the ruin becomes thwarted as the temporal velocity of decay intensifies. The decay quickens the more the ruin becomes exposed. Thus, while the erosion of the structure appears slow at first, emitting the impression of durability, before long it succumbs to a radical and swift alteration. As we return to the ruin to find our old navigation shattered, we are forced to be creative with our interaction. The linear path of the city-site, designed to impose itself upon the inhabitant, is slowly removed. In its place, our own displacement is confirmed. The geometry of ruins, particularly industrial ruins, which sprawl beyond the confines of hallways, rooms, and corridors, undermines our familiarity with the networks of grids and zones determining the city-site. Coupled with this geometrical disorientation, we find the collapse of sharp boundaries. The hitherto marginalized aspect of the particular, evident in the domestication of the organic, comes undone. Now, streams of wildlife drive into broken windows and puncture the floors, creating an uneven and sharp

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surface. In the ruined factory, old machines, rusty and fragmented, indiscriminately mingle with patches of fungus and moss. Doors that have come loose from their hinges allow trees to plunge inwards. Paradoxically, the close allegiance between barrenness and desolation that Casey considers is contested in the ruin as vegetation resounds in the silence. Barren of human activity, vegetative life makes a forceful presence, the richness of flora and fauna clashing violently with the gray stone and brown rust. Displaced from familiarity and order, in the ruin, we encounter a place of desolation marked by ambiguity and indeterminacy. The second aspect of spatial disruption affirms this ambiguity by pushing place to its temporal threshold. Considering this threshold, the temporally homogenous dimension of the city-site is challenged by the unfinished and fragmented temporality of the ruin. Unfinished, the ruin comes to be experienced, not as a temporally emplaced, but as haunted. The marginalizing of urban ruins has not meant that their history has ceased. Instead, we confront a place that intrudes upon the seamless present, disordering the unmarked line of time by invoking a spectral plane of uncanniness. Yet the persistence of the ruin is not a persistence of substantiality. The ruin is not the same as its previous (active) incarnation. Now, an altered place emerges, which retains the shadow of its old self, but simultaneously radically destabilizes that presence (Fig. 6). In the region of the haunted, we encounter an uncanny temporality. Characteristic of this altered temporality, a topology of ambiguous boundaries emerges. The alteration of a ruin’s place-name marks the initial stage in its fall from certainty. Only the most persistent place name remains. Generally, the designation of pastness suffices. Thus, “the old factory” comes to identify its previous being. The inclusion of “old” exposes an uncertainty. No longer sure that the same place persists, the inclusion of “old” recognizes both its erasure and its continuity. If we are faced with the same place, then establishing that this is the same place undergoes doubt. Yet something remains: a place, framed by resemblances, but distant from its origin. The fragmentation of a ruin’s place-name symbolizes a place that has been confined to the margins, spatially and temporally, but refuses to retire. The ruin comes back from a past, enforcing its presence in the present, thus fulfilling Freud’s account of the uncanny as “everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light” (Freud, 1985, p. 345). This coming-to-light materializes in the untimely quality of the ruin. Haven fallen from (active) time, the ruin becomes disjoined from time. The untimeliness is evident in how past, present, and future conspire to converge in the ruin. Having outlived its functional existence, the ruin’s persistence in time disproves outright extinction, so compels an unexpected return.

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Figure 6: The Bethlehem Steel Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle. In the “old” factory, the loss of activity does not entail an annihilation of being. The ruined structure remains broadly intact. Within that structure, the belongings of the old place maintain their presence. An intricate network of decomposing and rusted hallways lays bare the dead machinery, which lingers in the aftermath of motion. Only now, broken, fragmented, and divorced from its owner, the machine belongs nowhere. Small and apparently insignificant objects can also summon a disarming impasse. The everyday relics of intimacy—cups, stationary, files, crumpled papers—occupy a space in spite of their conversion to the unhomely. They remain in a place that has since forgotten them. With objects that display an overtly temporal reference, the disjunction is imposed. We become aware of the ruin’s ability to disrupt the continuity of time as we encounter objects from our own background now displaced in a foreign context. Conferring meaning upon objects, that same meaning comes back to haunt us. The inanimate quality of material things is thus overturned by an indecipherable and irreducible presence. In the ruin, these objects come alive by deforming their boundaries. A change takes place, which recalls the origin of those objects. They return to their

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original spontaneity, and yet are wholly decaying, rotting, and fragile to the touch. The return of the “thing” thus instills a warped timescale. What remains in the ruin is the trace of a past, fragmented and unable to be situated in an overarching narrative, fusing with the ruin’s decay in the present. Existence has become mediated through the work of decay. The delayed recognition of the active past, thus, not only becomes known, but also resounds vividly, as that same presence begins to vanish. A double bind, then: the presence of an absent past becomes crystallized by dint of its temporal distance, emitting a greater resonance the more it disappears. The double life of the ruin, as a shadow of its former being, now subverting that presence, means that we only recognize the totality of the place once its existence is threatened. The emergence of a past time in a present time reinforces the notion of the ruin as haunted. Central to this haunted spatiality is the delayed recognition of the ruin’s past. Together with the uncanny, Freud’s notion of Nachtraglichkeit (deferred action) captures the disrupted temporality of the unfinished past. There is past, a lineage, somewhat linear, somewhat ambiguous. We can think in terms of the history of an absolute past, rational and unyielding. What emerges in the present, even if remote from the domain of trauma, being especially susceptible to deferment, is an event that does not belong in the present, and is not recognized in that present. The time of the present, perpetually incomplete, but already preparing the groundwork for its pre-emptive nostalgia, produces a particle which only becomes evident once it has violently ruptured from its embodied disjointedness. Thus, even the untimely present can become domesticated. The domestication of the absolute past is not without implications. The same past hardens, so becoming entangled in time, not as a clear presence, but as a specter. The coming-to-light of a spectral past/present is possible in the ruin, since the representation of dynamic stasis causes a radical collision between episodic moments. The ruin attracts the discards of time. Such a gathering is possible because pure presence is suspended, creating a place in which the traces of history find their splintered deliverance. As we are able to recognize the entire history of space in a site while simultaneously recognizing the future absence of that history, the ruin’s magnetism resounds. The approach of fragmented memory beckons the end of that memory. The ruin is peculiar in that it attracts an estranged “timescape.” Unlike the impression of temporal autonomy in the city-site, the ruin foresees the future of decline while retaining the disused aspects of the past. By contrast, let us recall Nietzsche’s description of the historical consciousness experiencing the place-world.

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The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations, its holidays, like an illuminated diary of his youth and in all this he finds again himself, his force, his industry, his joy, his judgment, his folly and vices. Here we lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for we are tough and not to be ruined overnight (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 73).

At stake in this insightful passage is the attempt to linearize space temporally by fixing the continuity of identity. Nietzsche’s city rambler sees and attaches himself to the material of space, discovering in each nook and border an element of his previous self, now wedged into the landscape. The reassuring aspect concerning the spatial containment of memory, its persistence, is accomplished at the expense of producing a static representation of the past. “Here we lived...here we shall live.” With this confession, the suppression of contingent place is enforced. Moving away from the wilderness of the anti-space, the unreserved attachment to static place forms the dialectical equivalent. Being in time, Nietzsche’s antiquarian finds himself simultaneously in place. Yet the place that remains is delicate precisely because its foundations are being swept away. The return to old place is a confirmation that place attachment limits itself in temporal gradients. Thus, the other side of place attachment is the exposure of that place’s disintegration. The object of attachment is not fluctuating place, but the abstracted and static idea of an (ideal) past, since dispersed. Reading the contents of the past in the ruin proves contentious. In place of linearized time, we find a dreamscape in which memory comes unbound. Characteristic of this dreamscape, time runs off, allowing the image of the future to come into view. The place of decline, temporal and spatial, means that we are already outside of that, experiencing its absence while simultaneously located in the present. The ghosts of the future are as much present as those of the past. The spectrality translates to Nietzsche’s city rambler, in that the enclosure of memory in the present is no longer possible. “Here we lived...here we shall live,” thus becomes duplicitous, referring to two altered modes of time. Notably, the detachment of the ruin, evident in how it disturbs the placing of memory, reappears in the experience of passing through foreign cities. As with the ruin, memory is foreshadowed by its own closure. Becoming attached to passing place is hampered. There is a place we experience in the present. Yet within that the present, we are no longer present. Place is taking place in our absence. As a result of this temporal displacement, we see ourselves as specters of the future, not yet “there” but already sensed.

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IV The ghostly undercurrent of the present is examined in a political context in Derrida’s idea of “hauntology,” a pun on ontology which refers to the ambiguous half-life condition of the specter. In his Specters of Marx, Derrida considers the logic of the ghost from the perspective of contemporary politics and academia by invoking the ghost of Marx. Derrida’s invocation of the specter of Marx is employed to emphasize how academia attempts to evade spectrality by placing the figure of the ghost in an ontological context. Derrida writes: To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology. Ontology opposes it only in a movement of exorcism. Ontology is a conjuration (Derrida, 1994, p. 161).

In Derrida’s reading, dichotomizing the ghost into a simple past/present distinction mystifies the concept by destroying it. According to commentators Buse and Scott, “In the figure of the ghost, we see that past and present cannot be neatly separated from one another, as any idea of the present is always constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as anticipations of the future” (Buse and Scott, 1999, pp. 10–11). The convergence of temporal categories, each domain untimely and out-of-place in the other, is (dis)embodied in the image of the ghost, an image which does not implicate the supernatural, but makes the clear the incompletion of the past, the negation of autonomy in the present, and the uncertainty of the future. Derrida’s response to the absent presence of the specter is to urge a “politics of memory” which resists the repression of history in favor of a critical engagement with it (Derrida, 1994, p. 13). The undead past, now brought to light, is made possible by the re-remembrance of altered ghosts. Out of this injunction to critical recall, the past is recognized as disrupted and disturbed. Derrida writes: [We] must first recognize that these mutations perturb the onto-theological schemas or the philosophies of technics as such. They disturb political philosophies and the common concepts of democracy, they oblige us to reconsider all relations between State and nation, man and citizen, the private and the public, and so forth. This is where another thinking of historicity calls us beyond the metaphysical concept of history and the end of history (Ibid., p. 70).

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Applying Derrida’s notion of hauntology to the place of ruin, it becomes possible to reconfigure the border between space and place, order and disorder, and visibility and invisibility in terms of a logic of disruption. Outside of time, in the ruin, we are simultaneously aware of the foundation of time “mutating.” The ruin haunts, and is haunted. The residue of violence in the ruin, made possible because of the dynamic silence that encircles the cessation of activity, throws a distorted light on what ordered space conceals. The marginalizing of ruins thus coincides with the attempt to outlaw the ghosts of the city-site. Finally, the linear enclosure of the past, evident in plaques and static memorials, comes undone in the ruin as a more malleable and exposed history is created. Unconcealed in the ruin is the absence of a fixed and rational home. Mediating between absence and presence, the ruin makes clear the temporality of reason’s fall by gathering the remnants of its past in the present place. The dynamic vibrancy of the ruin, as a place in which twilight accumulates renewed strength as it veers toward an uncertain and protracted end, thus mirrors, but simultaneously embodies the disbanding of absolute rationality. The twofold mirroring and embodying conjures the ghostly impression of the ruin. The coming of the Nothing marks the arrival of this impression. “The external element,” Hegel writes in relation to aesthetic methodology, “has no value for us simply as it stands; we assume something further behind it, something inward, a significance, by which the external semblance has a soul breathed into it. It is this, its soul, that the external appearance indicates” (Hegel, 1993, p. 23). Hegel’s aesthetic dualism creates an interdependent relationship in which neither surface nor interior are autonomous. In their conjunction, a spark is ignited, establishing the basis for aesthetic experience as framed by the embodiment of a disembodied spirit. That which is embodied but already present comes to convey the uncanny moment whereby dormant ideas are released from the darkness, recognized in the aesthetic dimension of place. A strange recognition occurs. Something appears, already anticipated, but not entirely formed. Thus, the ruin (re)presents the unconcealed aspect of spatial-temporal rationality, so far obscured by the enforcement of homogenous space. Yet the simple possibility of recognition presupposes a previous knowledge of what is being embodied. If such knowledge has yet to be discovered externally, then the criterion is established by a selfrecognition. “The universal need for expression in art,” Hegel writes, “lies, therefore, in man’s impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, as an object in which he recognizes his own self” (Ibid., p. 36). Inside the ruin, the exterior-interior duality ambiguously unites. The correspondence linking the compression of time finds its spatial coun-

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terpart. We are in the realm of the Nothing, haunted by the memory of an undispersed past.

V In this chapter, we have seen how the spatial remains of post-industrialism align with the decline of reason. In a stage of historical decline, modern ruins beckon the protracted fall. That the surfacing of modern ruins was being anticipated fifty years ago suggests that the exhaustion of rationality and industrialism was already bound to a spatial context. In her celebrated book concerning Roman, Indian, Aztec, and other classical ruins, Rose Macaulay writes: Very soon, trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rosebay and fennel blossoming with the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon, the ruin will be enjungled, and the appropriate creatures will revel. Even ruins in city streets will, if they are left alone, come, soon or late, to the same fate. Month by month it grows harder to trace the streets around; here, we see, is this lane of tangled briars that was a street of warehouses; there, in those jungled caverns, stood the large tailor’s shop; where those grassy paths cross, a board swings, bearing the name of a tavern (Macaulay, 1977, p. 237).

Though Macaulay’s ruins are imagined, through that act of imagination, the power of the ruin is revealed. While Macaulay displays an untiring sensitivity to the ruin, her position inspires opposition. The ruin as an artifact counters its original implementation as an instrument that serves an end. Because of this fall from utility, associations of waste are prevalent. From phenomenology, we have stepped into the realm of evaluative ethics. Against Macaulay, let us read the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkins: Who can ever express the desolation of these forlorn scenes? The grey slag heaps, the acres of land littered with rusted fragments of machinery…vile buildings, more vile in ruin…the air about them still so foul that nothing more than a few nettles and tattered thistles will grow there. This is the worst that has happened to the land (cited in Barr, 1969, p. 38).

What grounds Hawkins’s judgment? Intuitively, the question of function involves an incendiary response in which aesthetic judgment is subverted through the manipulation of an object. A mechanism of modern art, originally exploited by Marcel Duchamp, now reduced to a cliché. The logic of utility, however, compels that the use of an object is exhausted upon conception. Use is useful only as it tends toward a particular end determined by a

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collective consensus. When the “collective” have outgrown their use, then it is deemed ruined. The bond between utility and aesthetic judgment warrants disconnection. The exhaustion of things outlives their physical demise. In the place of expiration, a morphological continuation of life persists, now in altered form. The thing has become otherwise, and in that becoming, beckons a new criterion of understanding. If the object is no longer in place in its previous context, the unhomely landscape adopts it. Thereafter, the division between the synthetic and the organic, the past and the present, is no longer traceable. The ruin situates itself in the in between, at the threshold of the place-world (Fig. 7).

Figure 7: Boatyard. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle. Our ability to be aroused by the ruin is dependent upon our sensitivity to the polarized tension between the homely and the unhomely. So long as we remain unable to identify with historically emplaced objects, the ruin appears obscure, inert, and indecipherable, at best a curiosity. Conversely, though we may recognize the historical importance of the ruin, to understand it without being attuned to our own proximity reduces it to an abstraction, a fractional relic. Complete in its incompleteness, the ruin requires no further justification other than direct experience. Stripped of its contingency, its particular

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spatial-temporality for instance, the essential form remains resolute despite transitions. Only the outward expression has changed. Thus, just as we are able to appreciate the lost grandiloquence of a Nineveh or a Syria by their artificial preservation, the same quality emerges in the midst of a factory no longer in operation. The only difference is that the ancient ruin is preserved enthusiastically by the hands of historians, and thus manages to embody the perfect position of teetering in a timeless, motionless moment upon absolute collapse without falling into it, while the modern ruin reaches that aspect through natural disuse. In the following chapter, I will explicate the element that binds ruins with a comparative analysis of ancient (or pre-industrial) and modern (or post-industrial) ruins.

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The Post-Industrial Sublime Our own era…seems to be that of space. We are in the age of the simultaneous, of juxtaposition, the near and the far, the side by side and the scattered. A period in which, in my view, the world is putting itself to the test, not so much as a great way of life destined to grow in time but as a net that links points together and creates its own muddle. Foucault (1997, p. 350)

I In the Lazio region of Italy, forty miles southeast of Rome, we discover the Gardens of Ninfa, Italy, also known as the “Pompeii of the Middle Ages.” During the Middle Ages, Ninfa was destroyed in the civil wars and reduced to a deserted village, which quickly fell to ruin. Deserted by the majority of its citizens for fear of being slaughtered, the village became infected, and, in turn, infested by ivy, shrubs, and malaria approaching from the marshy lakes. At dawn, the battlemented tower emerges through a veil of fog, aspiring to distinguish itself from the remains of the surrounding village. For centuries, Ninfa has lain ruined, abandoned, its medieval walls left to decay until a preservation agenda was established in the early twentieth century. Despite its picturesque veneer, the destruction that caused the decline of Ninfa remains intact. In the neat streets, enclosed by the bruised walls, we are never impervious to the original ruin, despite the fact that its torn houses and halflit churches have been rendered fertile soil. Ninfa is only protracted in its decline. The artifices employed by the hands of restorers remain crafts used to cultivate this protraction. Left to decay, Ninfa attains the dynamic of ruination because of its preserved status. Not entirely lost to dissolution, not entirely restored so as to appear prosperous, Ninfa occupies the ideal position whereby it resides in a permanent state of motionless and timeless decline. We feel safe knowing that the decay is cared for. Contrasting our finite narrative with that of Ninfa’s, we are fortunate not to have undergone a similar fate. It reassures by displaying its scars while lulling us into tranquility. Because of this evocation of tranquility, the clear and distinct impression of disinterested beauty emerges. In the passing away of time, preservation has secured a timeless past. From the perspective of the present, which, being incomplete, resists such determinate preservation, consciousness can imagine itself par-

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taking of this timeless serenity. Just as the flux of becoming strives to catch up with us, so aesthetic experience, catalyzed by the ruin, transports us to a location in which time has been suspended. Situating the ruin in a temporal context often proves difficult. Instead of being historically traceable, the ruin acquires a mythic status by being wholly distinct from the present. In the ruinous gardens of Ninfa, the desire to turn away from decay is annulled as beauty maintains a distance from the viewer. Instead, the inviting ruin pleads for our attention. In turn, we give it. Whereas passivity characterizes the experience of roaming ruinous gardens which testify to a static past, in contrast to this, let us transport ourselves to a site in which Ninfa’s core is replicated in a modern guise: Pristina. During the rule of King Milutin (1282–1321), Pristina was known as “The Royal City.” Today, as the capital of the Autonomous Region of Kosovo, Pristina is a city torn by war. During the final years of the twentieth century, in an effort to destroy the forces and facilities of Milosevic, NATO began a campaign to overthrow the despotic leader and restore peace. With Pristina as its principal target, the city became a war-zone. Within days of NATO’s campaign, thousands of refugees fled Pristina, seeking exile while the city became a ruin. Since Milosevic’s arrest, Pristina is slowly being repopulated. Today, the city is recovering with much enthusiasm, despite the army of UN vehicles still present, roads carved from the imprints of bombs, and a tense atmosphere framed by explosions and gunfire. This stands in marked contrast to the Pristina of the late 1990s. For the present purposes, identifying the quality peculiar to ruined place, I wish to concentrate on the image of desertion. Transporting ourselves from Ninfa to Pristina, we are placed in a different visual landscape. While a causal replication exists in that both are places of desertion, catalyzed by the threat of impending war, the expression of ruination is entirely divergent in each case. Ninfa’s inviting aspect is violently crushed in Pristina by a view of stark, burnt, and twisted steel. Where Ninfa spoke of managed gardens and ordered ruins, Pristina’s ruins defy aesthetic manipulation. Taking the place of succulence, heaps of rubble and demolished houses provide the background against which order is overruled. In the absence of their inhabitants, homes fall beneath care and become not only war ruins but natural ruins too. Because the wars in Pristina have yet to be consigned to history, the ruins entail volatility, precluding the possibility of a timeless and serene beauty. Instead, disinterested delight gives way to active precariousness. Here is no consolation, no context against which we ourselves can feel superior. The ruin is too close; it brims down too intensely. Confronted with this absence of temporal detachment, a sense of disquiet

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forms. No doubt, the ethical tension that surrounds an aesthetic consideration of war ruins renders aesthetic experience an unwelcome anomaly. While Ninfa and Pristina appear wholly distinct, Ninfa inviting beauty and Pristina invoking a moral response rather than outright aestheticism, the continuity between the two places is secured in that they share in the quality which implicates an uncanny convergence of temporal categories. Because they both verge on decline, Ninfa in a manipulated sense, Pristina of its own accord, their ruins defy time by being estranged from their native place. In both, the ruin brings about a past that endures despite conspiring to annihilate that object. As a result, the careful fall into dissolution remains impeccably evident. The peculiar junction of history that presages the uncanny is replicated in both places. In the village of Ninfa, we might question the aesthetic experience on account of it being sterilized through preservation. The essence of ruination, we might add, has been reduced to a sense of the picturesque and hence desensitized. Just as the tourist trail makes us feel outsiders to the ruin, so the ruin appears to diminish in size and power. This is a reasonable objection. Beneath Ninfa’s outward form, however, its fall from temporal order remains intact. With Ninfa, we observe an ambiguous representation. The image of an artificial sanctuary is cultivated so as to resist actual decay. Simultaneously, the image of ruination, since preserved, presupposes the original ruin in the first instance. In Pristina, any desire to conserve the place of ruin would be acrimoniously rejected. In our time, we are keen to restore what has been ruined by war, often to present the illusion that destruction can be amended through either restoration or conversion. The question of rendering the ruin monumental only arises when the ruin has been confined to a space delimited by rational margins. In that way, the ruin legitimizes itself by testifying to an event and rising above aestheticism. In the act of being preserved, the ruin reaches outside of itself and transmits the origins of its downfall to future generations. As preservation is undergone, the ruin risks the danger of being reduced to a monument.

II Correlating Ninfa with Pristina, we have concentrated on a general idea present within a broader context. Let us now examine a single aspect from an ancient and a modern city with the aim of identifying the difference in outward expression but also the persistent identity of the essence. Contrasting disparate places, if only to prove their essential continuity, we will consider two spaces that, prima facie, appear to be disunited: the ruins of a classical Roman theatre and the ruins of an abandoned train station.

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In the Roman Theater, arched walls soften the wind while dense sand absorbs the light. Further left, half-lit shadows seep in from the pillared columns. In the depths of the theater, we are easily lulled into longing for further ruination. Observing how the pillars hang precariously, supported only by a steel crutch, our desire is invariably reinforced. Partial ruination demands consummation, usually by way of absolute dissolution. The half-life context of protracted ruination evinces a desire to fulfill its destiny. Yet the suggestion of desire reveals the power of the ruin and necessitates the preservation of those powers. Without it, we would obtain a false distance between the ruin and ourselves. We do well to suspend the desire to exhaust the ruin, since the holding-out allows the ruin to disclose itself. Among Roman theaters that lend themselves to this state of ambiguous desire the Theater of Marcellus (Theatrum Marcelli) in Rome is exemplary. As with the majority of Roman theaters, Marcellus is half-circular, with the orchestra space in front of the stage. The residue of function is fragmented. The insistence that function once resided is a claim that is unconvincing, despite historical fact suggesting otherwise. Often, the impending gravity of a ruin, its being-in-place, can negate the belief that it was otherwise, less even a functioning structure. The irrecoverable quality of decay implicates how we perceive its history. With the Theater of Marcellus, the impression is of picturesque decay. In the midst of its mythical status, the ruin is inclusive of the present, for it is supported by the façade of a modern structure. Viewing it from the side, we see that the grandeur of the theater suddenly gives way to a modern structure used to support the theater and simultaneously to “complete” it. While the origins of the disjunction between fragility and solidity are rooted in the theater’s initial conversion to a fortress, before being transformed to a palace in the sixteenth century, its contemporary conservation means that the active quality of the ruin is wholly embodied. Verging on collapse without falling into collapse, in the grotesque, but splendid, synthesis between the artificial and the ancient, the same vulnerability that threatens to undermine us simultaneously unites us. The ruin transports us to a location of virility and infirmity. Because of this union, the ruin crystallizes the polarized proximity between the temporally distant and the familiar. We are grateful to the Italian engineers for allowing the ruin to appear precarious, since the allegorical aspect of decay is rendered clear by that precariousness. As the cloistered windows and scaffolding collide with ancient stone, so we become aware of the ruin’s fragmentation and in turn its power too (Fig. 8).

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Figure 8: Theater of Marcellus. Courtesy of Andrew Wickham. Along with Ninfa, aesthetic detachment is gained in the Theater of Marcellus, since the present allows us to witness its rise and fall while we remain spectators to the law of time. The classical ruin is ordered in that the formless tension of the incomplete present is contained. Temporally speaking, the ruin is over. Because of this closure, rationality, through discourse or imagined representation, can be conferred on the ruin. Aesthetic experience, meanwhile, means that unity is gained in the space—for we are no longer unambiguously in the realm of place—of preserved decline. Let us now return to the present and discover a ruin that challenges the impression that reason is sovereign to formlessness. Detroit, Michigan, once regarded as the modern city par excellence, today is the poorest city in the United States, buckling under economic depression and synonymous with urban decay due to a city government unable to fund the restoration of abandoned buildings. A Chilean-born photographer, Camilo José Vergara, has suggested that Detroit’s abandoned skyscrapers be turned into a “skyscraper ruin park.” Vergara writes: We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley.... Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees, vines, and wildflowers would grow on

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roofs and out of windows; goats and wild animals—squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and insects—would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots and screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings (Vergara, 1997, p. 12).

Vergara’s notion is shrewd, especially since Detroit’s urban architecture warrants careful aesthetic consideration. Let us consider the Michigan Central Train Station. Abandoned in 1988 as a result of diminishing passenger traffic, the station that remains is an empty shell, rich in decomposition. Upon entering the main concourse, vast ceilings, chipped Romanesque pillars, and a shattered mosaic create an imposing impression. Covered in graffiti, with wiry shrubs emerging from beneath the floor, the space has been transformed into a greenhouse of industrialized vegetation. As the stone veneer gives way, the building reveals its latent structure. Dull brickwork clashes with smashed windows, while massive columns, no doubt vulgar and too large in their prime, frame the empty arcade. In the concourse, the steel rails have been piled upon one another like the remains of the Berlin Wall. In the basement, a glass elevator, loaded with fallen debris, shudders: its doors a mausoleum of deterioration. Reentering the main terminal, the floor is littered with burnt glass and charred steel. Above the sixth floor, the rooms are fragmentary and partial, but no less resonant in significance, having never been occupied. Evading a clear temporal enclosure, the ruins of the Michigan Central Train Station lack the noble serenity of the classical ruin. Here, the presence of decay overwhelms. Whereas the ordering of classical ruins is structured by their unambiguous presence, in the case of the post-industrial ruin, ruination has yet to perish. Hence, disinterested contemplation falters while the ruin demolishes a solely formal response. Form shatters as the ruin invokes a sense of unformed disorder. While aspects can be withdrawn from the modern ruin—columns, windows, broken doorways—the form has yet to submit to inertia. We see glass breaking loose, the wallpaper peeling away, the floor collapsing, redefining what we thought was the original form. In the classical ruin, the form is absolute and thereby defines the status of that ruin. Thus, the remains of the abbey create a triumphant arch, which we regard as eternal. In the post-industrial ruin, this certainty is replaced by an unfolding of content in which the phenomenology of detail takes precedence.

III Michigan and Marcellus prove that temporal degrees often determine an aesthetic idea. In the ancient ruin, passivity might well preclude our sustained

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arousal, since it rewards only our formal delight. But the post-industrial ruin defies formality in exceeding passive comprehension. Devoid of a certain end, the ruin often invokes repulsion, which testifies to its potency. Yet because of this ambivalence, the ruin can reward us ontologically, while the classical ruin strives only to delight. This transition from passivity to activity tells us that the reception of the ruin is temporally sensitive. In other words, what was once able to contest the claims of rationality has now been incorporated and nullified by the rational project. What originally sought to overpower the static enforcement of reason has become an ally of reason in striving to a singular form. The qualitative status of the ruin is confirmed in how aesthetics has defined the beautiful and the sublime historically. With the Greek philosopher Longinus, the sublime as an aesthetic category emerges. In his On the Sublime, we are told how rhetoric fills us “with a proud exaltation and a sense of vaulting joy, just as though we had ourselves produced what we heard” (Longinus, 1965, p. 107). Although he established ideas that would remain central to discussions on the sublime—grand conceptions, inspired emotion, a zeal that borders on the violent, and above all a gravity of thought— Longinus’ text is largely concerned with the rhetorical sublime and thereby excludes the natural or synthetic sublime that would later be addressed by Edmund Burke. Burke’s seminal A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was celebrated for its contrast between the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime, Burke tells us, is Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror…it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling (Burke, 1998, p. 86).

The beautiful, conversely, is “a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them…they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affections toward their persons” (Ibid., p. 89). The differences are rendered explicit when Burke, in a familiar passage, depicts the sublime as vast, rugged, negligent, gloomy, and great, while the beautiful is small, smooth, polished, light, and delicate (Ibid., p. 157). For Kant, and later Schopenhauer, the satisfaction derived from the sublime is the experience of reason turning the terrifying object into a comprehended object of order and scale. This subordination of subject to object is not a consequence of a substance inherent in the object acting as a causal thing-in-itself. On the contrary: “The various feelings of enjoyment or of dis-

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pleasure rest not so much upon the nature of the external things that arouse them as upon each person’s own disposition to be moved by these pleasures or pains” (Kant, 1991, p. 45). With the sublime, reason renders the foreign object homely through the interceding in the act of cognition. Disinterested delight in the face of perceptible terror presupposes reason detaching itself from the senses for the senses to be cultivated. The sense of exaltation derived from the sublime is thus the experience of the subjugation of the senses through the intercession of reason. Reading Kant’s account of the sublime in a historic setting, we see that reason proves itself to be absolute through conquering the impression of formlessness. In such a moment, rational consciousness affirms its might against an object that it is able to measure itself. The aesthetic pleasure that derives from the sublime entails a hierarchical distinction between formlessness and reason. In the case of architecture, this is especially true. Kant notes, in The Critique of Judgment, that, “...any violation of symmetry, as in that of buildings...is displeasing because of its perversity of form, not alone in a practical way in respect of some definite use to which the thing may be put, but for an estimate that looks to all manner of possible purposes” (Kant, 1986, p. 111). Relocating this dynamic to the modern ruin, we observe the opposite emerging, namely, formlessness overpowering the presence of reason. If the enforcement of reason by way of detached (formal) contemplation gives way to aesthetic pleasure, then in reason’s inverted formulation, formlessness triumphs, not reason. In the ruin, the aspirations of order and permanence are disproved, while decay confirms the downward direction of progress. As Robert Jungk writes: The wrecks of smashed machines and engines, the closed down factories and abandoned laboratories and research stations—all bear the mark of Icarus, who had to crash to his death because his father, in a spirit of creative daring, had thought himself and his son capable of too much, too early (Jungk, 2000. pp. 7–8).

Unlike the Kantian sublime, the native context of the post-industrial sublime is not the halo of ascent but the flickering resonance of descent and gravity. The post-industrial sublime does not invite the transcendental possibility of “a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of selfpreservation,” but pulls us beneath nature so that the preservation of the self is undermined as boundaries become ambiguous (Kant, 1986, p. 111) (Fig. 9). Humanity is not, in Kant’s words, “saved…from humiliation” through empowering itself against a “might which is superior to great hindrances,” but is brought back to the earth while it recognizes in the ruin a glimpse of its future self (Ibid., p. 109).

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Figure 9: Power Station. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

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In the absence of reason, the conceited detachment of the Romantic sublime is expelled, while a sense of vertiginousness disarms the control we feel in the space of classical ruins. Often, the lack of control is due to the physical vulnerability of the ruin. Unlike the carefully manicured layout of the classical ruin, in the modern ruin we rely on conjecture as to how much pressure the space can withstand. Yet the lack of control is also rooted in the ruin’s temporal proximity. Because a trace of its former presence still resides and has yet to attain a mythic status, so allowing the Nothing to be known, the ruin refuses closure. Lacking closure, it becomes formless in that the event of the ruin is still becoming, thereby precluding detached spectatorship. The post-industrial sublime unfolds when reason is shown to be fictitious, just as the Kantian impression of the formless sought to render reason the real. Such aspects are overlooked in ordered space, where the denial of uncertainty and ambiguity becomes instrumental in providing a sense of spatial continuity. Consequentially, through the experience of the post-industrial sublime, we encounter Freud’s original description of the uncanny as the return of the repressed. So long as space remains closed to absence, preferring to fill the disrupted irregularity with homogenous presence, no matter how vacuous the presence, negative space will constitute an overcoming of repression. The ruin brings to light the exhaustion of reason. Because the absence is already known implicitly, the aesthetic effect is unsettling, yet simultaneously affirming, since it reveals a place capable of critical resistance against the enforcement of spatial rationality.

IV That beauty is a concept largely contested in contemporary art is an indication that the order of rationality has lost its influence. When beauty does persist, we usually find it reduced to trivial pastiche or parodied in a kitsch form. Legitimizing an aesthetics of passivity and delight from a formal perspective proves awkward, since it tacitly advocates what has already expired: namely, reason. Thus, beauty has been marginalized to the outside of art because what was once regarded as formless has shown itself to be illusory, since preservation has afforded the impression of it being ordered. In our time, the degree to which we can be startled into insight is nullified by historic fatigue. Through over-preservation and gradual sterilization, once sublime ruins of the classical world produce contemplative delight, provided by detached observation. The very beauty of the classical ruin has lessened any such opportunity for aesthetics to startle us. Without this unnerving presence, the ruin fails to create a place of resistance in which prolonged active engage-

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ment is possible. In effect, we become removed from the ruin, because it removes itself from time. That urban ruins will suffer the same fate as classical ruins is inevitable. As classical ruins lose their distinctive quality and become reduced to the “fabric” of the landscape, the status of artifact will be conferred upon them. “The sublime moves, the beautiful charms,” writes Kant accurately (Kant, 1986, p. 47). From our temporal perspective, ancient ruins can appear passive, contemplative, and thus beautiful. To make a definite hierarchal judgment between ancient and modern ruins would be crude. Yet the significance of the modern ruin ought to be evident in that it contests the claim of reason by embodying formless decline, which classical ruins and ordered space tend to suppress. In pursuit of the ontological value of aesthetics, we will have to venture to the place in which rationality violently disjoins from the absence of reason, creating an abrupt and often unsightly landscape. The landscape of contested reason maintains a trace of its former presence while demonstrating destruction of that trace. Accordingly, for spatial dynamic stasis, as it might be termed, to emerge, rewarding us with a glimpse of ontological embodiment, decay must smolder from the ruin. As we will now discover in a brief analysis of Brighton’s West Pier, in some cases this smoldering is literal.

V Until its abandonment in 1970, the West Pier was an illustration of flawless Victorian design. Together with Brighton’s reputation as a place of decadence, squalor, and pomp, the pier formed a ceremonial centerpiece that became synonymous with the disjunctive unity between the refined and the raucous. The unity still exists today. Peter Campbell recently wrote in The London Review of Books: The charm of Brighton cannot be separated from its combination of brilliance and decay. Seaside salt wind is hard on its façades; its weather-beaten face is always in need of another coat of slap. (In Brighton scaffolding is in such demand that it goes on from job to job and never gets back to the yard.) (Campbell, 2002, p. 45).

To the detriment of the pier, corrosive weathering effects caused the pierhead to be partially closed in 1970, and in 1975, the entire structure was closed. Since then, the pier has fallen to further erosion, despite restoration plans. The effects of this were realized in the winter of 2002 during a violent storm when the walkway connecting the concert hall to the pavilion collapsed thus leaving it teetering precariously against the shore (Fig. 10).

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Figure 10: The West Pier, Brighton. Image by author.

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Supported by remnants of the steel pillars, verging on ruin, and with streams of the Victorian wood floating in the sea, the pier finally obtained its essential quality. Derelict and disused, the once resilient structure glides into the ocean without resistance. As a result of the spectacle, when the pier’s decay provoked the impression that the slightest intensity of wind would render it extinct, the pier proved aesthetically enticing. Thereafter, the Nothing individuated itself as the empty canvas self-consciously disbanded. Shards of complicated steel, once an arrangement of meticulous proportion, fell beneath the sea, creating the pleasing visage of a submerged cavern. While the spectator of the ruined pier was convinced that each new morning would bring about its annihilation, in the spring of 2003, a fire enraptured the pier in flames, bellowing dense smoke through the city, until only the empty, inert, and skeletal iron frame remained. Considering the ruinous dynamics of the pier, first in its stage of partial collapse, then its eventual scalded dissolution, Rilke’s “just able to endure” crystallizes. While in a state of partial ruin, whereby the previous form was still visible, the West Pier was an object aesthetically determined by its future dissolution. Gazing at it, historical splendor united with imminent collapse. The polarized dynamic divorcing temporal episodes had dissolved. The becoming of time and the future of time were indissoluble. As the pier smoldered, its apogee was announced. Even the starlings, circling the corpse with recklessness, danced vivaciously to the lashings of the flames as their house burnt before them. Burnt beyond recognition, Rilke’s “just” had been exceeded so that the sublime terror which we are “just able to endure” forced itself toward the charred remain, no longer resplendent in decay. Instead, the category of sublimity discovered a post-sublime mode of aesthetics, namely, the dissolute. Existing beyond its inferno, the aesthetics of decay outlived itself. Unable to express a final consent, the frame manifests itself as a lacuna on the seascape. Thereafter, its sublimity drowns along with the scalded fragments entrenched in the seabed.

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The Phenomenology of the Alleyway Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed strangles the shrubs, the yellow roots of nettles creep onward in the soil, burdock stands a whole head taller than oneself, brown rot and greenfly are everywhere, and even the sheets of paper on which one endeavors to put together a few words and sentences seem covered in mildew. W.G. Sebald (2002, p. 181)

I The transition from the beautiful to the sublime, then to the dissolute, is not always as apparent as it was in Brighton’s West Pier. Sublimity persists so long as the object maintains a trace of its former being. As voyeurs of the ruinous, we delight in seeing the half-lit moon fading into darkness. When the object vanishes completely, we turn away in melancholy, as though to avoid being reminded of our finitude. Decay is only aesthetic when immersed in the shadow of its former splendor. What distinguishes the transition from the sublime to the dissolute is not the scale or grandeur of an object, though the same features invariably contribute to the distinction. An occupied shopping mall is prosaic and utilitarian. Left abandoned for a decade, its corridors magnetize. We encounter the sublime when decay is perfected to appear complete. In the case of the West Pier, the rise and fall of the sublime was announced through its initial abundance of decay, which was then intensified in the inferno, before being vanquished by the charred dissolution. Against the background of the regal structure, the sublime was visible in the exterior shell, shrouded by decay. Today, the annihilation of its former being means that we are faced with an atemporal structural frame, lacking in distinguishing features and determined by extinction, not an aesthetic momentum of becoming-toward. With the correlation between sublimity and decay established, vastness does not fall by the wayside. Ontological amplification, to borrow a term from Bachelard, reaches beyond narrow confines in conjunction with an intensity of place. Scale, however, denotes a new aesthetic mode, itself able to negotiate ontology as space withdraws. Sublimity, compelled by decay, means that context becomes secondary. Hence, place does not legitimize an aesthetics of decay. Instead, decay legitimizes the aesthetics of place, a claim I will clarify in the penultimate chapter. The decay of an object broaches the

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previous limitations of that object by introducing an aspect of indeterminacy into the object. Decayed equipment embarks on a new life, which recalls a previous mode of being. Simultaneously, the aesthetic dimension of that object alters as beauty is undermined by sublimity, brought about as the object becomes ruined: a transformation as evident in the factory as it is in the discarded tool. This ruinous sublimity becomes apparent when we phenomenologically enter the urban alleyway. Discarded boxes, sour leftovers, and the faded coating of graffiti contribute forcefully to the peculiar intimacy the alleyway holds. A phenomenology of the alleyway must concern itself with only the apparent and the evident. As we enter the alleyway, consideration of causality and implication is superfluous. We do not intrude upon the space, but only survey. Phenomenologically, the question of appearances is sufficient. What makes itself known becomes the guiding question. Much will be learnt about the everyday, undoubtedly obscured by supposition, when our eyes become disorientated from their habit and habitat. The urge for sensory engagement can often preclude things from unfolding in their natural configuration. Already, sensibility fashions the object to our expectations. Passing over the discards, the origin of aesthetic significance vanishes. In the place of this automated reception of things, the propensity toward experiential protraction means that objects resound with their original being. “One would have to sink into profound daydreaming” writes Bachelard correctly, “to be moved by the vast museum of insignificant things” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 142). Among the dumpsters and discarded artifacts, we are able to observe the interaction between decay and sublimity in their natural habitat. The gestures of urban decay displace the traditional sublime by replacing the rational with the formless. With this displacement, depth falls into the background while the careful arrangement of debris and waste constitutes a landscape of depth and intrigue. Encountering a discarded, slightly dilapidated fridge, what strikes us is the perfect uselessness of the object. True, we might examine such an object and ascertain its worth as piece of functional machinery. When we concede to the redundancy of the fridge, however, we accept it as a ruin and nothing more. The fridge is silent. It no longer moves. If the door hangs upon its hinge, traces of its former life are exposed. Stains, odors, and colors allude to a life framed by utility, preserved by anonymous memories. If the fridge is amongst old papers, torn boxes, and assorted debris, it takes on the impression of a vacant house, disengaged from its environment. Likewise, a torn suitcase plastered with inscriptions of foreign lands on its surface suggests a life now involved in a feud between the disrepair of the present

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and the persistence of the past. With the lid of the suitcase intact, it pleases the eye with its weathering and battered corners. As the lid is ripped from its hinge, the aesthetic aspect gives rise to the dissolute. While old objects perish and expire, the unwavering mutability of the alleyway means that the thread of continuity is assured as spontaneous decay is reintroduced. Through a phenomenological reading of trash, history is unraveled while the discards form a spatial-temporal narrative, open to a hermeneutic interaction. Alive with decay, the objects of the alleyway seethe with life too.

II Let us take a step back, however. In doing so, we see the alleyway in a broader context, as a negation of the space of presence and regularity. Whereas the majority of urban existence takes place in the space of the functional, the structured, and the ordered, in the alley these characteristics are subverted because the alleyway occupies a halfway house between utility and lassitude. Spatial lassitude implicates a non-place in which the deformation of use clashes with the residue of use. The alleyway withdraws from the safety of determined being. Instead, it encloses itself by being isolated from ordered space. Crossing the threshold between the space of order and the space of contested order means venturing to an ambiguous terrain in which previous conventions are no longer trusted. The order of the alleyway, along with the law of the derelict factory, ruined asylum, and other modern ruins, is vague. The territorial impasse of boundaries means that our encounters in the alleyway are unpredictable and volatile. The negative ambiguity is reinforced, as the alleyway becomes the native place for vagrants. Hence, our interaction with the alleyway is limited to a utilitarian aspect. Disposing of refuge or taking a shortcut means that the space of presence is able to be justified as a space of passing through. With that in between moment, the home of the vagrant is situated against a fragmented backdrop. For civil life, this is the appropriate place for social disorder. Rationalization allows us, fortuitously, to permit space to debris. Even social disorder can be made to belong, so long as the disorder is excluded from order. Thus, the remains of positive space are filtered into the alleyway, meaning that the alleyway becomes a symbolic and literal space for leftovers. Because the alleyway is a hiatus amid the urban life, its role as dissolute is centralized. This dissoluteness fulfills the alleyway’s meaning of degeneration and dissipation, and so the bond between the licentious and the detritic is disclosed. The charm of the alleyway exceeds aesthetic merits by its becoming a sanctum sanctorum for the salacious. Enclosed walls and the surging

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and withdrawing of passing activity mean that the alleyway attracts prurience. The cat too, with its docile temperament, reinforces the twilight hour of licentious place by roaming that place stealthily. Yet the cat is seldom immobile. As the alleyway catches water, the cat flees. The mixture of humidity and water in the alleyway enables decay to flourish, a motif that the filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky often employs to great effect. Writing about the use of landscape in his film “Stalker,” Tarkovsky writes: Rain is after all typical of the landscape in which I grew up; in Russia you have these long, dreary, persistent rains….rain, fire, water, snow, dew, the driving ground wind—are all part of the material setting in which we dwell; I would even say of the truth of our lives (Tarkovsky, 1986, p. 212).

With “Stalker,” a post-industrial wasteland becomes the metaphysical landscape in which disused vehicles and humid decay shadow green vegetation. Tarkovsky’s interpretation of nature reclaiming the ruin thus involves a disharmony in that the reclamation of nature becomes overrun by water, so reducing nature to a ruin. Among the four elements, water is the raw matter of decay. We see this in how water can absorb solid material with ease at higher temperatures. With warmer climates, the erosive consequences of water are more visible. More visible, water is able to permeate the fissures and cracks within stone, thereby hastening the process of dissolution. Leon Battista Alberti, the Renaissance architect and sculptor, was rightly vigilant of the virulent nature of water: Rain is always prepared to wreak mischief, and never fails to exploit even the least opening to do some harm: by its subtlety it infiltrates, by softening it corrupts, and by its persistence it undermines the whole strength of the building, until it eventually brings ruin and destruction on the entire work (Alberti, 1988, p. 93).

In Venice, this ruinous dissolution is manifest par excellence. Venice’s rancid canals and dank alleys, humid and densely compressed, have become synonymous with the image of aesthetic decay. The fluid pollution of the canals is a leitmotif of the city in peril. In Venice, the attribution of water to dissolution fulfills its twin meanings of degeneration and dissipation. That Venetian canals and lagoons take on the form of libidinal passages is symbolic in that gondolas embody dissolution. By providing the passenger with the means to passively observe the peeling façade of passing buildings while courting a companion, the gondola suggests deterioration and debauchery simultaneously. When Georges Bataille uses the word “dissolute” to describe

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himself, we know he is referring to the word in both its pejorative and its ruinous sense (Bataille, 2001, p. xiii). Each term implies the other. We have seen how the alleyway occupies an anti-space of negation, whereby decay interacts with the absence of an ordered presence. The absence of order and convention, and the insertion of decay and humidity, contribute to the distortion of temporality in the alleyway. The alleyway opens within the context of an animated backdrop, creating a theatrical aspect in which the tall, enclosed walls capture stifled light. Time blurs as daylight is manipulated and stretched. The compression of silence, maintained by the tight presence, allows voices elsewhere to resound. We hear more in the alleyway despite being further from sound. The undoing of urban space in the alleyway means that it establishes itself in contrast to the motion of non-alleyway space. Because of this contrast, temporality is altered, as is velocity. In the carefully arranged, manicured, and cultivated grid of the city, rigor and consistency are central. The alleyway counters consistency by being indeterminate. Hence, time falls from its designated position and warrants a new mode of engagement, namely the reflective. The aesthetic aspect of the alleyway, its unification of the fragmented and splintered, extends to the occupants of the buildings, offices, and restaurants surrounding the alleyway. For the workers, the alleyway becomes a shelter, whereby respite is provided from active being. Often, lounging at the back door of the restaurant can attain a metaphysical significance as the tearing away from pragmatism and presence forces the vastness of the alleyway to unfold.

III The residue of use present in the discarded object determined the aesthetic quality of that object, while the same use foresaw a future extinction. With the battered suitcase, history collides. Use, however, does not ipso facto negate the aesthetic aspect of the object. Often, an ambiguous overlapping can render the boundary between utility and entropy imprecise. Useful objects, after all, tend toward temporal persistence despite their erosion. Sometimes we find ourselves still using the object as it continues to erode. Treading over the decaying staircase in order to gain access to my apartment does not mean that the staircase falls from use. Instead, it means that decay urges me to work alongside the ruined staircase. The half-life status of the semi-ruined recaptures the eighteenth and nineteenth century impression of “picturesque decay.” With the apartment stoop, a place of transience and repose, the sentiments of intimacy and entropy

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combine. By joining the private home with the public street, the stoop occupies an indefinite terrain, whereby reverie is secured by a tacit boundary. Being-in-the-world on the stoop means immersion without commitment. Iron railings, ascending in parallel to the steps, present the impression of being housed in, wrapped up, and sheltered. Because of this privileged spatial position, dwelling is rooted in a careful balance between inside and outside, which shelters the dweller. As the stoop remains enclosed, the dweller is able to acquire a temporal relationship with space, despite material disintegration. This “picturesque decay” of the stoop is extended, as it becomes a platform to sell discarded objects no longer in use. The stoop sale, a domestic convention of brownstone Brooklyn, New York, emits pleasurable ruin, as decay becomes a center of affirmation and commerce. All has passed. All is falling. The aesthetic value of a typewriter, fragmented and incomplete, its ribbon torn, case weathered, astride a damp stoop, resurges in use as exhaustion warrants a new life. In itself, the negation of use does not justify aesthetic appeal. The immaculate piano, which is simultaneously faulty, is dead. On the stoop, uselessness and transience, a twilight combination reflected in the melancholy stone of Brooklyn, contribute toward the aesthetic dimension of decay. The cycle of the stoop means that we gain attachment to the place as it becomes inscribed in our memory. For Bachelard, the continuity of memory is a prerequisite to dwelling. Without memory, individual place would be regarded as a disparate entity. This is an important element of Bachelard’s account of dwelling. Dwelling would be incomplete were stability undermined. In concrete terms, a dwelling that was not stable would enforce a sense of spatial disorientation upon the dweller. Casey writes, “To be on the high sea is to be constantly exposed in the midst of something constantly changing” (Casey, 1993, p. 109). In the same way, stability is born of enclosure, limitation, and continuity. Thus, one does not usually dwell in a space of transition. In fact, the very inhabitability of these places testifies to how dwelling depends upon stability. Dwelling in a bus shelter is stigmatized for the reason that it is seen as a degraded form of dwelling in which stability has fallen from grace. Replacing it, a makeshift form of stability conceived through urgency, necessity, and desperation. Home comforts are expendable. The station dweller is exposed spatially, in that there is a lack of distinction between inside and outside, and temporally in that the context in which exterior influences exist is undetermined. Lacking the space in which limits can be defined, temporal continuity dissolves. When a dwelling lacks enclosure, we forsake the possibility of becoming attached to that place, since we do not belong to it. Not belonging to any given

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place, we neither carry it with us in the search for a new dwelling, nor do we identify with what is lost when we move on. This distinction between being at home and finding a dwelling in which we can shelter is centered on the conflict involving being in a familiar space yet not owning that space. In the departure lounge, repose is threatened by a lack of continuity. Even if we care to remember the precise configuration of things situated within transient space, and so aspire to own an element of it, we are powerless to enforce that recollected image upon lived experience, since the two temporal aspects necessarily disjoin. What we own in our memory dissolves when that memory is disproved by present experience. We are accustomed to thinking of departure lounges, shopping malls, and hotel lobbies as cold places, not fit for habitation. Transient space encourages motion and not repose. We are led to pass through it. When we do seek motionlessness in motion-bound space, anxiety is the likely result. There is something uneasy about a siesta in a supermarket. When we find ourselves displaced from our dwelling, we seek out features that render the dwelling familiar. Such is the bond between temporal continuity and stability. Bachelard writes, “All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard, 1994, p.5). Inhabiting the departure lounge, there is always the consolation that the space is bringing us nearer to an old dwelling, or otherwise drawing us closer to a new one. For the station dweller, however, such consolations are absent. At best, the dweller secures a corner in which the cold is kept out. On the stoop, the melancholy of the departure lounge is overcome, since the same place is able to be returned to, while the occasional decay of the stoop forges intimate bonds. The attraction of decay flourishes as we observe its changes, thus providing a narrative for our experiential history. With the stoop, a dialogue is established between our persistence and the protracted decline of material: a dialogue that the immobility of the stoop facilitates. Things rise and fall. New evidence of decay arises. We become accustomed to the sight of a singular piece of flaking rust before it turns to dust. Likewise, we take vast interest in the sight of a new crack in the tile. The tile permits a new image and holds a bond with the viewer that is only lost when the crack gives way or is restored. Despite this momentary continuity, the stoop alters form, loses its radiance as our memories are reduced to still life. The delayed time between departure and return entails that the original image of place acquires a mythic quality. We tend to think of this spatial myth in terms of an enduring quality, irrespective of there being a gaze to witness the change that place undergoes before it becomes lost space. We are comfortable to leave things standing

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and travel in foreign directions. Adhering to an implicit logic, which ascribes substance to materiality, the spirit of things grows undiminished. In the return to the old place, we seek out the origin of memory, and at the gateway of spatial memory, we are not lost. Instead, we embark on a waiting that dreams of an unbuilt future. With this, a projection of sound, pulled from memory, is able to substitute for what has decayed. Cities and homes are labyrinths in terms of their alcoves. Images are displaced, sounds disrupted. In time, we lose our grip on what was once central and so revert to the entrance. Assurance of the beginning of memory can sometimes mean that we know where that memory ends. On the stoop, a tacit hope is born that the ambiguous half-life status will evade the temporal annihilation, which undermines the stoop’s identity. As a corner of being, it appears indissoluble. Bachelard: “every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination.…the corner becomes a negation of the Universe” (Ibid., p. 136). Bachelard’s negation emerges as the Archimedean axis in which the occupant sits, allowing the world to revolve around the stoop-dweller and not vice-versa.

IV From images of unity and closure, let us expose dwelling to the violence of the outside. Both the stoop and the alleyway require a subtle interplay between inside and outside so that dwelling alongside decay is aesthetic. This spatial interplay is incomplete because ruins tend toward a complete disintegration of inside and outside. To return to Bachelard, inside space is closely aligned with intimacy, while the outside is posited as being in hostile conflict with intimacy: “there will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box,” Bachelard writes approvingly (Ibid., p. 88). For Bachelard, the relationship between inside and outside is said to be a dialectical one, implying an inherent but mutual friction, whereby the identity of each aspect depends on the other for its identity. As we shall see, such a division, despite its mutuality, is not unequivocal. Inside and outside is a distinction that exceeds architectural space. For Bachelard, it is also an implicit distinction between the home and the nonhome. That is, between that which secures intimacy and that which threatens to undermine intimacy. Thus, if inside and outside form a “dialectics of division,” examining this tension in concrete terms will clarify its implications. In the first instance, the central feature of the intimate place is to shelter daydreaming, to provide a space of dwelling in which “fixations of happiness”

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can be relived (Ibid., p. 6). Since the house is the storehouse of memories, and because memories provide the foundation for Bachelard’s account of dwelling, the role of the house encasing these memories is fundamental to this shelter. Can we infer that a dwelling that did not encase us would unhinge the sheltering role and so render the dweller a “dispersed being”? (Ibid., p. 7). The physical embodiment of this exposure to the outside is only one way in which the tension is manifest. Yet the physical exposure is an important aspect, which reveals the partial perspective of Bachelard’s position. For Bachelard, the house is never a mere “inert box,” but rather a living and “airy” entity, dynamic in its geometrical interplay (Ibid., p. 47). As a result of this fluidity, references to organic aspects of the house are ubiquitous in Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. One especially notable passage concerns Bachelard’s employment of an organic metaphor in order to subdue the hum of the urban Parisian apartment, as when: A neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I ‘naturalize’ the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden…I say to myself ‘That’s my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree.’ This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me (Ibid., p. 97).

Since urban space is more populated than rural, the risk of intrusion, disruption, and unpredictably is greater. With the context of dwelling, unpredictability is antithetical to what is homely. Being at home means being able to orientate ourselves in a familiar place. When we return to a dwelling, we shut the door on the inside and proceed to encase ourselves in a defined area. Hence, if it is the case that an influence from the outside intrudes upon this world by emitting unwanted noise, we feel as though our space has been violated. For Bachelard, this is particularly problematic in that his subjectivist stance requires the imagination to be cultivated in a protected environment, whereby consistency takes precedence. A disrupted reverie loses both its seductiveness and its ability to propel the imagination into “the space of elsewhere.” Bachelard’s response to this contingency is to domesticate the outside through using the non-home as a source of imagination. By rendering a woodpecker out of the sound of nails driven into his wall, Bachelard finds respite from the outside and manages to sustain the illusory comfort of shelter. Seeing the outside from the perspective of the inside is Bachelard’s method for justifying the non-home. It is a questionable maneuver, however, since conditioning the outside from the place of the inside delimits dwelling to the point whereby dwelling becomes rigid and repressed. While firm

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boundaries can define our sense of well-being in knowing where we belong, when these boundaries oppose one another, the dogma of a static dwelling is the likely outcome. For this reason, ambiguity between these divisions does not bode well for Bachelard’s account of dwelling, since without an explicit distinction between inside and outside, the space to withdraw would dissolve. This is evident in Bachelard’s apocalyptic reading of a poem by Henri Michaux, where being succumbs to nothingness once this ambiguity is met. Michaux’s poem, “Shade-Haunted Space,” alludes to a hostile tension between inside and outside which has finally imploded. The consequence of this implosion is negative: “Space, but you cannot even conceive the horrible inside-outside that real space is.” In resisting this dissolution, there is a “desperate to effort to ‘exist as a single unity.’” Yet this striving is thwarted— “destroyed by punishment, it was reduced to a noise, a thunderous noise” (Ibid., p. 217). Bachelard’s response to this poem is explicit. The hum that derives from this loss of distinction is described as an “echo from the vaults of hell” (Ibid.). Bachelard’s disparaging reaction to Michaux’s depiction of fallen space leads him to the conclusion that, “In this ‘horrible insideoutside’ of unuttered words and unfulfilled intentions, within itself, being is slowly digesting its nothingness” (Ibid.). Devoid of a division between inside and outside, being erodes for Bachelard. Taking its place is an ambiguous drifting in which “the mind has lost its geometrical homeland” (Ibid.). Bachelard’s reading of Michaux’s poem is a testament to the precarious foundations of his shelter. Since intimate space is dependent on a mutual tension with the outside, when this mutual tension gives way to the “horrible inside-outside that real space is,” then the identity of intimate space loses its distinctiveness. With it, well-being dissolves. Ambiguous space precludes withdrawal. Instead, the failure to discriminate between inside and outside entails a sense of homelessness without resolution. This exposure to the nonhome leaves Bachelard’s shelter unprotected and so vulnerable to the disruption of the imagination. Yet as Edward Casey points out, the etymological origins of the term, “dwell” imply lingering and going astray (Casey, 1993, p. 114). Going astray means being open to the ambiguity between inside and outside. This is an ambiguity that must deviate from the normative concept of the home and instead broach the non-home if dwelling is to resist the insidious connotations of the “homeland.” For Bachelard, however, until being is enclosed by identifying itself with what opposes the home, it remains susceptible to the void of uncertainty: a void undoubtedly endangered as the stoop rises to the staircase.

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Aesthetic Revulsion: Staircases and Rust And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. Genesis, 28:12

I On the apartment stoop, the conjunction between uselessness and decay reveals an implicit narrative rendered explicit when we extend the stoop into the staircase. Defining the value of the staircase in singular terms, however, proves unattainable; its symbolism exceeds convention. When we enter into the staircase, archetypes emerge as the alteration between ascent, descent, and mediation conjoins. Despite the multiplicity of meaning, what remains consistent and constituent of the staircase’s identity is the desire to ascend it. The aspect of ascent realizes itself, in that hermetic symbolism aligns the ladder with the pathway to knowledge, and by consequence, the “stairway of life.” In the alchemical and cabbalistic traditions, we find the image of the ladder central. For the alchemist, each of the seven rungs corresponds to the ascending levels that unite the adept with plant, animal, human, angel, and eventually God. On the final rung, this unity with God ends in silence. Robert Fludd writes: In man, various faculties of knowledge…correspond to the tiered arrangement of the macrocosm. The last rung is the direct comprehension of the divine world in meditation. The ladder extends no further, because God himself cannot be comprehended (cited in Roob, 1997, p. 285).

For Fludd, the staircase reveals a striving toward the absolute. From the vantage point of the final step, knowledge is gained and base ignorance overturned. A similar instruction appears in William Blake. In his etching “The Gates of Paradise” (1793), we find Blake crystallizing this striving by depicting the struggle to fulfill ascent as a passionate yearning. Similarly, in “Jacob’s Ladder” (1800), Blake depicts the celestial ascent as a medium between the divine and humane, the ladder itself emerging as the transmuting agent between human being and God. Notably, Blake was keen to align the

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ladder with the ear, since the passage of the ear exults “the endlessly twisting spiral ascents to the Heaven of Heavens” (Ibid., p. 297). Following Blake, listening carefully to each rung of the ladder, becoming aware of the momentum gathered in the course of ascent, becomes an imperative. On the stoop, a corner was established in which the energy of dwelling was clear. In the enclosed exposure, the stoop encouraged a retreat from temporality. With the stairwell, inclusion and exclusion coincide. Ascent and descent remain opposed and mutually exclusive. Alchemically, the staircase provides a symbolic bond between microcosm and macrocosm. Divinity and humanity collide, and thus merge. Phenomenologically, let us bracket this bond by emplacing the staircase under an existential analysis. Spatially, a division on the staircase is marked by the polarity between ascent and repose. At the top, the struggle of movement beckons to cease, so emphasizing the rest that takes the place of becoming. In mythical terms, the final step is aligned with the idyllic point, since withdrawal from the staircase begins in proximity to the absence of movement. If ascension is complete, and with it, its utilitarian purpose, what remains is the contemplation of this upward ascent, which only begins as our experience of it ends. The memory of our plight rewards us as we turn away from the struggle. The relationship between ascent and “the good” is not absolute. Hegel’s image of the pathway to despair is as central as Blake’s vision of theosophical enlightenment. An illustration of this destructive history of the staircase is found in the 186 steps of the Wiener Graben, Austria, also known as the “Stairs of Death.” During the Second World War, prisoners were forced to climb the stairs with blocks of granite strapped to their backs, often falling back upon other prisoners, killing them with the weight (cf. Bernadac, 1978). If they succeeded in reaching the summit, prisoners would be forced to leap to their death below. More prosaically, staircases that do not reward ascent tend to be memorable, if only because they purport to negate their supposed essence. Because of this inversion, staircases that fall into an abyss are a motif central to Surrealism and Freudian dreams. In the disarming of expectation, the logic of the staircase is undermined. When Nietzsche writes, “And so onwards along the path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence! However you may be, be your own source of experience! Throw off your discontent about your nature; forgive yourself your own self, for you have in it a ladder with a hundred rungs, on which you can climb to knowledge,” we know intuitively that his dictum “what does not kill me, only makes me stronger” also extends to the staircase (Nietzsche, 1994, p. 174). Nietzsche’s passage tells us that the ascending dynamic of the ladder is an internal act of self-leniency by which

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knowledge is attained. The epistemological dimension of the staircase reappears in everyday spaces apparently devoid of significance. The hill and mountaintop are obvious cases in which we journey to a definite peak in order to survey the ground beneath. The pleasure involved in the ascent is aesthetic and epistemological. From the summit, an aesthetic pleasure in knowing how far we have ascended fuses with the spatial view encountered. Conversing with Goethe, Eckerman writes notably: We seated ourselves with our backs against the oak; so that during breakfast we had before us the view over half Thuringia. Meanwhile, we demolished a brace of roast partridges, with new white bread, and drank a flask of very good wine out of a cup of pure gold that Goethe carried with him on such excursions in a yellow leather case (Eckerman, 1998, p. 229).

What is significant about this passage is the influence place has over everyday activities. With Weimar beneath them, Goethe and Eckerman were able to partake of breakfast without humbling themselves to the bare act of utility. Goethe’s loftiness is replicated in our everyday encounters with the world. Let us imagine a terraced café, the foundations of which are raised above the floor, creating a distance between the café dweller and the passerby. With the place beyond reach, the exposed enclosure of the stoop figures in the structure of the raised café. When the alignment between dwelling and passing through becomes equal, repose is shattered. The incursion of place occurs because of an equality between spatial modes. Dwelling is ruptured. The mountain and raised café are determined by spatial exclusion, which ascent privileges. Up above, things pass us by, often without our knowing. Drawing this thought downwards, the gravity of the staircase is affirmed. At the base, anticipation and indeterminacy become central. So long as the surface remains unattainable, dwelling is disrupted. As children, we play at the foot of the staircase. Motion and playfulness push the logic of the lower staircase to its limit. In conjunction with this limit, the presence of the door in proximity to the base binds anticipation to apprehension, reestablishing Bachelard’s account of dwelling as dependent upon a distinction from the outside. Already dwelling proves volatile by being exposed, strengthening the spatial otherness of the unattained ascent. When Wagner chose to premiere his “Siegfried Idyll” (1870), we should not, therefore, be surprised that he chose to do so at the top of the stairwell in Tribschen. The anecdote, both celebrated and familiar, is worthy of mention because of the significance the staircase plays. On the morning of Cosima Wagner’s thirty-third birthday, a small orchestra of thirteen players, who previously had been rehearsing the piece in secrecy, arranged themselves at

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the peak of the staircase, feet away from her bedroom, where she was still resting, and serenaded her with the first performance of his Idyll. By arranging the orchestra at the top of the stairwell, Wagner was able to create a sense of intimacy, mirrored by the ascending tonality of the music, whereby repose is gained.

II Hitherto we have covered anecdotal cases of the staircase, exploring the internal and existential dynamic in the process. Our findings have resulted in the conjunction between epistemological enlightenment and aesthetic pleasure. As ascent begins to lose its sway, however, so destabilizing the staircase, what occurs? Intuitively, we feel compelled to ascend the staircase, curious as to where it might lead or end. A staircase is an inviting entrance, its conclusion a source of curiosity. Umberto Eco writes fittingly: “Undoubtedly a stair acts on me as a compelling stimulus: the stair stimulates me to go up, even when, stumbling over the first step in the dark, I cannot see it” (cited in Broadbent, 1980, p. 14). In the case of the ruined staircase, the inviting aspect undergoes a loss of certainty. How do we approach a staircase that is no longer able to be used as such? Struggle is inherent in ascent. With the decayed staircase, however, already fissured and in danger of giving way, the struggle risks exhaustion. Yet correlating repulsion with truncation should be suspended until we have immersed ourselves in the ruined staircase. The immersion is not arbitrary. Through it, we will discover the interplay between ascent and descent in their totality, so providing insight into the struggle between the expectation of rationality and the experience of ruin. Let us firstly direct our attention to the aspect of linearity which rationality posits in the notion of temporal continuity between events and identities. The intact staircase establishes a spatial relationship between interconnecting points. From base to elevation, the law of order is maintained. Undoubtedly, this is what Heinrich Wölfflin meant when he wrote in his The Principles of Art History, “the evenly firm and clear boundaries of solid objects give the spectator a feeling of security, as if he could move along them with his fingers” (Wölfflin, 1950, p. 21). In the absence of ruin, this security binds us. Such is the integrated nature of staircases: only when we lose our step is its presence felt. We experience shock when encountering a ruined staircase, disconnected from its linear interconnectedness. The means to a higher end, itself an aesthetic dimension, loses its identity. Speaking of such spatial violation, Bernard Tschumi writes: “Steep and dangerous stairs, those corridors

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consciously made too narrow for crowds, introduce a radical shift from architecture as an object of contemplation to architecture as a perverse instrument…” (Tschumi, 2001, p. 124). In such a perverse collision of expectation and experience, what discloses itself? The architect Richard Hill speculates: “The linear simplicity, and the confronting presence of an armature of lines that can be grasped, is a response to a threatening and uncomprehended outer world” (Hill, 1999, p. 64). Hill’s remark, echoing Bachelard, implicitly correlates threat and exteriority to non-linearity, a correlation made explicit in the ruin. Against this threat of non-linearity, the handrail defines its presence by creating an enclosing boundary where none exists (Fig. 11).

Figure 11: Mt. Loretto Girls’ School. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle. One way in which the ruined staircase discloses its non-linear subversions is through the experience of giddiness. Giddiness, by all accounts, can occur when we lose our step on a pristine and expansive staircase, such as the grand staircase in the Paris Opera House. Thereafter, we experience a precarious hovering between the desire to maintain stability and an unconscious thrust toward collapse. In his impressive The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Designs, John Templer explains: “People fall because they lose their balance irretrievably; no postural correction enables them to remain on their feet. Their normal gait is interrupted, and their center of gravity

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moves out from the base provided by their feet” (Templer, 1992, p. 8). The importance of this passage is Templer’s correlation between the base and the center, that is, the home upon which we tread. With the home undermined, giddiness is experienced as the center becomes decentered. What Templer’s account of falling does not acknowledge is the pleasure we receive in falling. A tacit truth is revealed: when we concede to the inevitable, all that remains is the pleasure we experience in succumbing to collapse. Rational resistance while we tumble toward earth expresses itself as an indignity determined by the desire to reverse our decline. When Bataille refers to “transgressing the taboo,” such a gentle compulsion is implicated. In a remarkable passage set before a great height and exposed by the absence of a guardrail, Bataille speaks eloquently of the anguish of temptation: The view may cause us to step back, but the image of the possible fall, which is connected with it, may also suggest that we jump, in spite or because of the death we will find there. This depends on the sum of available energy which remains in us, under pressure, but in a certain disequilibrium. What is certain is that the lure of the void and of ruination does not in any way correspond to a diminished vitality (Bataille, 1991, p. 108).

Instead of provoking a homogeneous response framed by civility, ruination incites, as Bataille correctly observes, an instinct more primordial. Aesthetics does not, therefore, guarantee recognition of the importance of falling. Yet the figure of the staircase becoming an object of terror is central to literary horror, Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” being the obvious example. What would be hoped to be gained in the desire to outwit the sentient staircase? Reprising our meditation on the ruined staircase, what emerges is the apparent impossibility of ascent or descent. We are stranded in a halfway house where life and knowledge, originally central to ascent, suddenly fall under the shadow of decay. Because of this non-linearity, we expect our encounter with the ruined staircase to be a bewildering experience. Yet bewilderment is outlived by curiosity as our proximity toward the exposure is heightened. Thus, when we approach a staircase that no longer serves its use, we are not repulsed, but, conversely, drawn to the space for the very reason that it bares a polarity that the former function hid. In the absence of spatial clarity, we encounter a fusion between the desire to dissolve and the aspiration toward the ascension of life. The presence of decay might have negated the possibility of ascent; in the deficiency, however, the desire to dissolve affirmatively remains intact. Now, ascendancy progresses toward decline, not ascent. As

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the rungs on the ladder break, cultivation toward ontological decline is established. Freud’s concept of the “death instinct” mirrors the logic of ascending toward ruin. For Freud, the instinct is a manifestation of an organism’s desire to return to its “primeval, inorganic state,” inorganic implying a cessation of activity, a state of void tension (Freud, 2001, p. 118). The death instinct opposes and enters into a struggle with Eros, the libidinal instinct. Freud’s correlation between ethical value and the death drive, a statement of his Schopenhauerean pessimism, reveals itself as global. Writing to Einstein, Freud identifies the death drive, “at work in every living creature and striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter (Ibid., p. 357). Despite Freud’s attempts to distance himself from Schopenhauer, the latter’s notion of “willing” is implicit in Freud’s ethical stance. Whereas Schopenhauer countered absolute pessimism by postulating a theory of redemption, Freud’s perspective is deterministic. This is crucial, because Freud’s death instinct reveals itself as inherently negative, an impossible instinct that can only find release by sublimating itself. Yet “the phenomena of life could only be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing actions of these two instincts” (Ibid., 119). Freud’s death instinct materializes as a compulsion toward destruction. The compulsion is repressed, however, as civilization “obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it” (Ibid., p. 124). Suppression of destruction thus conjoins with the insistence on order, beauty, and cleanliness, until the domestication of nature, by way of putting it to use, translates as a “high level of civilization” (Ibid., p. 92–93). The cultivation of useless things, meanwhile, reveals spiritual refinement, in that it displays a surplus of order. Beauty, the cultivating of nature, conflicts with dirt, which is viewed as “incompatible with civilization” (Ibid., p. 93). Finally, beauty and cleanliness converge in the enforcement of order, which “enables men to use space and time to the best advantage” (Ibid.). Freud’s analysis of the struggle between destruction and civilization is prefigured in the ruin. The inhibiting and regulating drive toward rational progression, viewed in terms of maintaining order, is shattered. Whereas Freud posits an ambiguous ethical value onto the death instinct, aware that it confirms the image of humanity as fallen, our study of a purposeful fall warrants a reconfiguration of progress. The staircase has been a demonstration of this progression, whereby antithetical impulses between ascent and descent converge. That the possibility of the ascent has been removed means only that the desire is reinforced. The desire to ascend toward movement aligns with the same desire that appears as rational progress gives way to the pres-

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ence of silence, so exposing what was originally suppressed by civilization and reason, decline.

III In the region of the beautiful, our gaze is serene and melancholy. Decay forces us to withstand an image that, treated unaesthetically, risks revulsion. Revulsion might prove beneficial, however. Holding out into the Nothing is a movement of dynamism, soon expired as pleasure withdraws. The staircase, as we have seen, mirrors the temporal condition of aesthetic categories. The strong delimitation of the staircase is outmoded as rust, rot, and corrosion make a presence. Amid aesthetics and collapse, a void opens. In between the opposition, the exposure of danger reveals the origin of aesthetic interest. Many apartment fire escapes are fortuitous in their peril. An entire labyrinth of fire escapes, each disconnected from the others, each capable of its own aesthetic nuance, aligned in perfect disharmony. And the rust: exquisite, rich, and weaving in complexity. We are fortunate if we discover a banister that leads to apartments below, the iron rail sufficiently eroded by harsh weathering to reveal the bare remains of a tenuous structure beneath. Things have given way. With them, so has our sense of ontological security. At prey to the possibilities of the unbarred world, with any sense of orientation lost to a pathway that can neither be ascended nor descended, a shift of aesthetic consciousness takes place whereby disorientation takes precedence over pleasure. Between sublimity and the dissolute, we discover the aesthetics of revulsion, which renders the ruin not only unaesthetic, but also pernicious. One such feature that pushes aesthetics beyond repair is rust. The distinguishing nature of rust appears in the disparity between the exposed enclosure of the stoop and the ontological violence we experience on the staircase. On the stoop, home has been established. With it, a sufficient distance between erosion and dwelling is obtained. With the staircase, repose is crushed, since a decayed staircase is fragmented and therefore spatially abstract. Neither belonging to ascent nor to descent, it enters an impasse. Yet as decayed place anticipates becoming otherwise, rust intercedes between dwelling and the anti-home. Rust resounds with value when we align it with revulsion. Let us proceed to examine such an interaction.

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IV The aesthetics of rust compels antithetical volatility between repulsion and pleasure. This virulent dichotomy should not surprise us. We have seen how the staircase mirrors an ambivalent attraction by which the desire to dissolve appears. With rust, such an internal dynamism is quickly displaced by an external enforcement. With the staircase, ascension takes place in solitude. It is always we who must ascend it in order to ascertain where the staircase leads. Phenomenologically, rust differs. Rust exceeds delimited space in terms of its horizontality. Whereas the staircase maintains a visual obscurity, rust is open, creating a landscape which contains innumerable perspectives. Yet because it overruns between spaces, overlapping from one spatial form to another, the imperative to suppress it becomes central. Hence, rust joins us in our attack on the rational ordering of space and time by sliding in between spatial zones, undermining what reason has sought to marginalize. By inciting a reaction in the subject, rust declares its value. Visually, the visceral aspect of rust, its supple, flaking, almost erotic undercurrent, emerges as a sheath of decay which violates simple distaste and instead urges repulsion. With rust, the contained aspect of spatial decay is undermined as its presence is enforced upon domestic place. Thus, a taboo takes place. The clean order of the privileged home suffers at the hands of corruption as the same object we valued becomes its shadowy other. In the unity of the intact object, holes manifest themselves, coated by the trace of brown erosion. Uselessness is thus compounded by the sense of the object being hollowed out and debased. Restorers, curators, and archivists strive to undo destruction. Each of them seeks to grasp the permanent and so vanquish the corrosive effects of rust. Yet each remains guilty of maintaining a perspective on time which struggles toward domestication, and so falsity. Considering this suppression of rust, Antoine Picon makes the distinction between the sublime ugliness of rust and the picturesque beauty of classical ruins: “Why does rust frighten us so while the ruin is adorned with a reassuring character? ...the ruin…restores man to nature. Rust, on the other hand, confines him in the middle of his productions as if within a prison, a prison all the more terrible since he is its builder” (Picon, 2000, p. 79). In Picon’s reading, the repugnant character of rust is due to its transitional nature. Near enough to remind us of what the structure once was, it induces a sense of regret to know that this is what the structure has become. The ruin, meanwhile, places itself in a space in which distance coincides with resignation. Ruination does reclaim nature. But rust is neither reclaimed nor extinguished; thus, it lingers in a halfway house between sublimity and the dissolute (Fig. 12).

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Figure 12: Steel Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

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We have seen in the case of Brighton’s charred West Pier how an extremity of rust can expand the aesthetics of the sublime into the aesthetics of the dissolute. Undoubtedly, the debates surrounding the future of the pier were determined by a distinction between the memory of regal decay and the future of extinction. Once the fire had gutted the shell of the pier, the only question remaining was how to dismantle the structure prudently. Rust had ruined its chance of restoration. When decline is irreversible, then pleasure and decay bind together. As the fall of Rome proved, aesthetic judgment alters in temporal contexts. An equation can be constructed: the nearer we stand to the end of a temporal moment, the greater the inversion of aesthetic values becomes. The revision of values only occurs as curiosity, often termed either morbid or perverse, overpowers habit. For us, the place of decay has been established and with it, an aesthetic criterion constructed.

V In our evaluation of rust, we follow in the footsteps of a precursor who provides a framework in which our own position can be defined. That figure is Gustav Metzger. Metzger, a Jew of Polish descent, now an exile living in London, is the founder of a movement he termed “auto-destructive art.” While the theory gained notoriety in the 1960s, what remains of its legacy now has been manipulated into political activism. Arising from the spirit of Dada and Futurism, auto-destructive art is a theory of revolt that aspires to demonstrate a society’s failures by reflecting its destructive tendencies through aesthetic composition. Political failure, the will-to-destroy, and nature’s ruin provide the impetus for Metzger’s work. He writes: “To go on limiting oneself to achievement strictly within the rules of a profession laid down by a society that is on the point of collapse, is, to me, a betrayal” (Metzger, 1996, p. 27). Through positioning himself at the center of things, Metzger’s analysis of modern society is disparaging: Chemical, biological, and radiological weapons….Look at the destruction taking place around you. If we go into the streets we are attacked by the exhaust—lethal in concentration—of motor vehicles…You know that vibration damages buildings….Add to this disease-engendering atmosphere, pollution by smoking, carbon dioxide….food encapsulated and infiltrated by chemical fertilizers and sprays, constantly damaging bodies and minds…radio-active fallout…continuous noise (Ibid., pp. 28–29).

Coupled with this destruction, Metzger notes the advancement of antiplace “city centre sites [in which] more and more fine land will be covered

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by low quality housing estates and motorways—to increase the turnover of the building and engineering industries. To survive—capitalism must continue to expand production. It is boom or bust!” (Ibid., p. 29). Despite the outward pessimism, Metzger’s idealistic optimism is disclosed through the destructive ambition of his work. Using such materials as “acid, adhesives, ballistics, corrosion, explosives, feedback, heat, ice, metal, nuclear energy, pressure, sand, steam, welding, wire…” (Ibid., p. 60), Metzger stimulated a cathartic reaction in the viewer by re-enacting the destruction of the exterior world. Characteristic of this optimism, we find his work public, not confined to the institutional setting of the gallery. Kinetic, therefore, is the form of Metzger’s art, whereby the movement of the viewer influences the disintegration of the artwork, so instilling a bond between the two. This “mass therapy,” to use his regrettable phrase, would have the effect of communicating an ideological agenda subdued outside of an aesthetic context. The most celebrated case of this extreme communication took place in London. A report from The Times describes it thus: Summoned by a green-tinted manifesto called Auto-destructive Art, a crowd assembled at the South Bank, London, on July 3, 1961. The time was 11.45 am. Three large nylon sheets, colored white, black and red, stood flapping on a metal frame. They must have looked like an extreme assertion of abstract art at its most minimal, but Gustav Metzger regarded them more as sacrificial victims. Protected by a gasmask, he stepped forward, lifted up a spray gun and covered the sheets in hydrochloric acid. Seconds later, they began to disintegrate and after 20 minutes the ragged remnants had dissolved (cited in Cole, 1999, p. 23).

What would Metzger hope to achieve by this demonstration? We find the totality of his vision presented: self-contained destruction, the affirmation of the mutable, the emphasis on both fragmentedness and “falling bodies,” the role of acidic heat, the aleatoric nature of composition and destruction, and, finally, the enforcement of the irreversible. Each of these elements in Metzger’s work unites in his “principle of the aesthetic of revulsion.” For Metzger, the viewer is forced to reflect on the origins of his or her revulsion, so compelling the desire to reject the “state represented.” Metzger is correct to suggest that Grünewald was the founder of the aesthetics of revulsion, a sentiment anticipated by J.K. Huysmans. For Grünewald, the task of the artist was to induce a state of repulsion in the viewer. Such a state would lead the viewer to overcome the repugnance, so seeking unity in the unsightly. Grünewald’s graphic depictions of Christ in agony prove effective, because they incite compassion and disgust concurrently.

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Huysmans’s description of Grünewald’s “Crucifixion” (1523–24) is especially valuable and worth quoting at length: The fluvial wound in the side dripped thickly, inundating the thigh with blood that was like congealing mulberry juice. Milky pus, which yet was somewhat reddish, something like the color of grey Moselle, oozed from the chest and ran down over the abdomen and the loin cloth. The knees had been forced together and the rotulae touched, but the lower legs were held wide apart, though the feet were placed one on top of the other. These, beginning to putrefy, were turning green beneath a river of blood. Spongy and blistered, they were horrible, the flesh tumefied, swollen over the head of the spike, and the gripping toes, with the horny blue nails, contradicted the imploring gesture of the hands, turning that benediction into a curse; and as the hands pointed heavenward, so the feet seemed to cling to earth, to that ochre ground, ferruginous like the purple soil of Thuringia (Huysmans, 1986, pp. 12–13).

Replicating this model of aesthetic experience, Metzger replaces pious motivation with a political ethos. In contrast to Huysmans, let us read Metzger: Auto-destructive art seeks to remind people of the horrors which they are perpetrating, and is a warning and an admonition to reverse this direction. By setting up large-scale industrially-produced sculptures in a process of disintegration, autodestructive art, through the aesthetic of revulsion can lead to a rejection of many aspects of our civilizations (Metzger, 1996, p. 45).

With this passage, Metzger implicates himself in a framework of ethical consequentialism. Despite Metzger’s aesthetic sensitivity toward the power of decay, by committing himself to a consequentialist perspective of disintegration, he reduces the process to a specific end. We ought not to be surprised: politics tends to determine aesthetics in advance. The effect, however, is a form of aesthetic experience that legitimizes itself with recourse to action. As the political agenda disbands, so aesthetics loses its dynamism, often prematurely. With his later work, Damaged Nature, the close relationship between aesthetics and politics converges through eco-pessimism. Yet the pessimism is duplicitous, since Metzger sets in place a restorative ethics. With Metzger’s desire to restore the wounds of society, his position proves untenable. In his favor, the methodology mirrors the negating affirmation characterized by Hegel and the Socratic dialogue, whereby epistemological certainty is formed by the enforcement of negation. Turning to what Metzger terms “the aesthetic potential of rust” and how it is “insensitive of artists to go on making works that are supposed to be permanent” (Ibid., pp.47–49), we discover rust falling into the same ethical position. Instead of phenomenologi-

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cally bracketing the implications of rust before entering into a dialogue with it, rust is employed to achieve a particular social aim, namely, moral enlightenment. Metzger rightly acknowledges that “corrosion is regarded as an enemy of our civilization,” but then degrades any such aesthetic consideration by adding, “…that is one reason why it can be used in the aesthetics of revulsion” (Ibid., p. 48). The putting-to-use of the ruin only allies it with what the ruin originally set out to contest. That the process of alignment should be used to construct a higher ethical end negates the aesthetic value of rust, so enforcing its pernicious role as an object of derision. The effect of this manipulation is that auto-destructive art effaces its own ambitions by rendering the ruin a novelty. From the present perspective, any such “mechanized” attitude toward decay and rust is rejected. Correlating utility with ruin halts the process that gave rise to the value of aesthetic experience.

VI In this chapter, we have seen how the value of the staircase emerges when the possibility of ascent is negated, so leaving the remnants of a drive that becomes formed with the convergence between desire and dissolution. The epistemological description of the staircase as the pathway to knowledge has proved contentious. In the place of ascent, we have aligned descent with a challenge to linearity. Following from this, we discovered that the aesthetics of the staircase leads to a sense of revulsion, accentuated by the lack of security. One instance of this revulsion was present in rust. In the work of Gustav Metzger, this notion of revulsion was used to degrade the aesthetics of decay by employing it in a consequentialist framework. Metzger’s error was to counter decay by imposing limits upon the work of art. What Metzger did assert correctly, however, was the kinetic bond between subject and object, each mirroring and influencing the other. In the following chapter, we shall discover one way in which the landscape of urban decay is realized through spontaneous experience. In the unity between inquisitive subject and corresponding object of ruin, we hope to find a relationship that realizes the aesthetic fulfillment of the ruin. The name of this practice is urban exploration.

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Transgressing Place: Urban Exploration Ascend though into the ruins of cities, go to those of old, Behold the skulls of the latter ascend the former ones. Which is not an evil-doer, which is not a benefactor? Untitled Assyrian Text (cited in Plumb, 1984, p. 46)

I As modern ruins have flourished, with their presence felt in the urban center, and not only on the margins, aesthetic revulsion has been matched by a desire to explore and celebrate such spaces. Urban exploration is the term employed concerning the exploration of abandoned, subterranean, or hidden spaces. Deriving from North America, though now global, urban exploration has prospered in the final decades of the twentieth century as the development of modern ruins has intensified. In the context of urban exploration, abandonment does not necessitate an exclusion of “active” spaces, such as those found in the spaciousness of an airport departure lounge or in the jostle of the supermarket. Commitment to exploring the hidden layers of everyday place is often as central as decayed place. In the present chapter, I will suggest how this bond between everyday place, active but prosaic, and decayed place, inactive but resonant, emerges. For now, let us define urban exploration in more detail by locating it in its historical context. The resemblance between urban exploration and the nineteenth century favor for follies, together with the twentieth century establishment of industrial archaeology, is suggestive of a distinct response to time and space. In the case of the follies, we see an equivalent aesthetic sensibility toward the useless and superfluous, whereby a retreat from appearances is substituted by an affirmation of curiously atemporal nostalgia. Becoming aesthetically lost in the ruin allowed the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility framed by the ceaseless state of the mock-ruin. In the nineteenth century, this aristocratic stance manifested itself as a fondness for artificial ruins: Greek Parthenons, private churches, obelisks, and useless towers employed as ornaments. By emphasizing the superfluity of space, its excessive remains, the pervasive spirit of utilitarianism is contested with a call to the image of Rome and

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Greece. Because of this temporal retreat, the Romantic aesthete was a position of defiance, supported by a resistance against time and embodied in the timeless ruin. Before late Romanticism, the Italian engraver Piranesi realized that ruins, by becoming a form of subjective imprisonment whereby the mind confines itself, were an aesthetic ideal. Enforcing a world framed by decay and collapse, the eye veils itself from the fabric of reality and instead forges a reality shaded in the patina tones of erosion. Where natural ruins were lacking, artificial ones were built. Exoticism, as displayed by both Goethe and Byron, thereafter became a symbol of superiority and rebellion. As an extension of this imaginative impression, we discover the English and French aristocracy reconstructing classical ruins. The motivation is twofold. Firstly, the reconstruction is an expression of taste; secondly, it is to manipulate an artificial paradise whereby the traveler is situated in several contexts simultaneously. This kind of exoticism, a multifarious duplicity, was portrayed perfectly in Huysmans’s Against Nature in the scene where the protagonist simply imagines being in London instead of committing himself to the voyage. In the case of the folly, this imaginative act enables the viewer to traverse social contexts by forging a communion between the past and the present, as Christopher Woodward writes in his pleasing In Ruins: “A ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator; as they strolled between the colonnades his visitors would recall the Roman Forum, Ephesus, or Palmyra, each completing a picture of their own” (Woodward, 2001, p. 139). The lineage of artificiality, from Romanticism to the present, continues in the form of kitsch artifacts constructing the landscape of the garden, themselves embodiments of the excess of space. Gazebos, plastic windmills, and electric waterfalls contribute to the folly aesthetics by suggesting the illusion of temporal depth and spatial distance over artifice and pretence.

II If the Romantic consciousness bore a similarity to urban exploration’s propensity toward a purely aesthetic contemplation of space, then the content of the space is replicated, albeit partially, with the advent of industrial archaeology. Emerging after the structural destruction of the Second World War, as a discipline, industrial archaeology is still in its infancy, the term originating only in the 1950s. What the term “industrial” covers in terms of scope is contentious. A broadly accepted definition states:

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An industrial monument is any building or fixed structure, especially of the period of the Industrial Revolution, which either alone or associated with primary plant or equipment, illustrates the beginning and development of industrial and technical process, including means of communication (Raistrick, 1973, p. 2).

Raistrick’s description highlights the specific physicality of the topic. The comparatively small scale and spatially limited undertaking of industrial archeology means that an overarching theoretical position is usually absent. Instead, industrial archeology lends itself toward a descriptive account of remains and ruins. As Palmer and Neaverson write, the development of industrialism often resulted in displacement and poverty, evident in “contradictions between the forces and the relations of production, i.e. between capitalist organizations utilizing new technology and the social organization of the workforce who were forced to adapt to a new working and often also a new domestic environment” (Palmer and Neaverson, 1998, p. 4). The aspect of social fallout is not brought forth in industrial archeology. The decontextualizing of space is consistent with a descriptive engagement with space. Yet the mode of decontextualizing does not derive from a phenomenological stance, but from a limited mode of empirically based practice. In conjunction with this descriptive and impartial stance, the methods employed testify to the factual focus. Field studies, research, excavation, statistical analysis, photography: all become central in the attempt to render the mutable past solid. The concern with preservation has often meant that a specific aspect of industrial history has been abstracted from its context. Because they are tangible remains, monuments from the fallout of industrialism are given focus, rather than the place in which those monuments are rooted. Yet the selectivity of industrial archaeology entails a reduction of space whereby the ruin falls into the category of heritage. Raistrick’s description of the warehouse is informative in this respect, since it annihilates what is distinct to the remains of the warehouse, namely, its process in time: The essentials of any warehouse are safe storage with adequate facilities for receiving, handling, and quickly moving goods in and out. Cranes, trucks, conveyors, and special means of handling and moving materials will be the bulk of the equipment of a warehouse. The warehouse needs the maximum storage space for its goods, combined with easy handling… (Raistrick, 1973, p. 152).

The factual formality of Raistrick’s account testifies to the demand to archive space without ever encountering it. History, especially European history, has suffered from neglecting monuments. The destruction of medieval monasteries and abbeys is today countered by a desire to preserve, restore, and isolate historically significance space, irrespective of the consequence

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such a desire has upon the original ruin or monument. Thus, the act of historicizing space gains its value by being stored and recorded, appeasing the public demand for a timeless and placeless nostalgia in the process. While aesthetics falls from the view of the industrial archeologist, the role of data gathering intensifies. We now turn to urban exploration within the context of industrial archeology and Romanticism. Unlike industrial archaeology, for urban exploration, the relationship between experience in the present and the preservation of the past is ambiguous. The recognition of the pleasure of ruin conflicts with an equal loyalty to spatial centrality. The community-based nature of urban exploration has meant that civic pride has become attached to specific sites, a peculiar sentiment determined by the severity of decay present in the ruin. That the tacit ethical rule underpinning urban exploration insists on not tampering with the site, taking only photographic pictures, enables the practice to align itself with the preservative agenda of industrial archeology while distancing itself from trespassing. In spite of this spatial attachment, lived experience constitutes the attraction of urban experience, so binding it with the Romantic sensibility toward the remains of space. Yet the alignment between the Romantic consciousness and the urban explorer surpasses their immediate manifestation. Instead, both arise and take place in a climate of cultural decadence. The coming of Romantic follies could have only emerged in an age where progress was stalled, so preparing the ground for aesthetic nostalgia: “Shuttered summerhouses, neglected parks, marble steps overrun with weeds, inspired dreamers almost as much as Benares and Byzantium,” so writes Philippe Jullian in reference to the fin de siècle revulsion for the temporal present (Jullian, 1971, p. 115). Like Piranesi before them, the Symbolists sought refuge in negating the present by turning to ruins. The resignation to a temporal mode outside of the Symbolists’ own confirmed their oftenironic decadence. The ruin, especially the artificial ruin, succeeded in manipulating time and space by creating a mythical and exotic image. In a contemporary context, the exoticism of artificial ruins is replicated through sites of musty dereliction and decay: gray spaces that dissolve the charming beauty of picturesque ruins and instead replace them with dank, rotten, and often dangerous places of industrial and sociological collapse. In an interview with Jeff Chapman, the originator of urban exploration, not long before his untimely death, told me: Decay is just one of the sights I appreciate when exploring. I love beautiful buildings…there is no denying that the whole tragic process of decay is breathtaking to behold. There is a powerful sense of entropy, particularly when you see nature

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struggling to reclaim an artificial area as its turf. Nature’s efforts always look pitiful at first, but you know that eventually nature will win (dylantrigg.com, 2005).

Unlike Romanticism, this unfolding entropy takes place not among mock ruins but in actual spaces of urban decay. At the same time, we can anticipate the industrial ruin becoming a folly in its own right. The nostalgicizing of the present, an essential means by which the present is made tolerable, means that structures that define that present are already in place (and emplaced) to become future novelties. The future of nostalgic objects is judged in terms of what the temporal present discards. Thus, in this way the present acquires a double life by being lived again, but now in its entirety. Where finding such relics proves impossible, artificial ones will be created. We can expect the artifice itself to erode, in the process generating a repetitious cycle of decay whereby the form reflects the idea and vice-versa ad infinitum. The question uniting urban exploration and Romanticism is thus: how should a civilization react when progress, hitherto supposed to be founded in ascent, truth, and reason, has then been shadowed by a stronger inverted pull from beneath? The answer is evasive in singular terms. At best, signs portray expressions of a collective unconsciousness: revolt, resistance, resignation, and so forth. The mood is often more telling than the details. History has proven how a culture can withdraw, so justifying what was regarded as antithetical to rational progress. Positivism, natural and logical, is the clearest exaggeration of this convulsion. Nietzsche writes precisely: Waste, decay, elimination need not be condemned: they are necessary consequences of life, of the growth of life. The phenomenon of decadence is as necessary as any increase and advance of life; one is in no position to abolish it. Reason demands, on the contrary, that we do justice to it (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 25).

By seeking to rationalize decline, decadence is acknowledged while being exasperated. Inversely, a lack of threat does not compel a struggle. Instead, things remain as they are. Yet as rationality is disrupted by decline, the aestheticizing of that decline ensues, so establishing the decadent consciousness, a trait evident in urban exploration and Romanticism. Because of this temporal proximity between culture and aesthetics, the ruin is able to be elevated from its initial disregard. The strangeness of treating present ruins aesthetically is peculiar to decadence. Rome exemplifies this and nineteenth century Romanticism mirrors it. The elevation of the natural ruin distinguishes itself from the image of intended destruction, compelling an ethical aspect which morally implicates the viewer in the present. The rationality of the war-torn city, though abhor-

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rent, nevertheless expects closure. The war-ruin has a purpose in that its destruction supposedly justifies an end. Overseeing the fallout of war, in contradistinction to natural ruins, manages to evade the charge of “aestheticism” because an explicitly humanitarian element is involved. Morally, the absence of an imperative in the natural ruin creates a space where ruination can dissociate itself from reason. Transgressing this boundary between destruction and decay would instigate a taboo whereby aesthetics suppresses ethics. Sometimes the boundary between decay and destruction is unclear. The magnetism of the structural implosion appears to merit an ethical and an aesthetical response simultaneously. With the building in ruins, the aesthetic dimension collides with the intended destruction. Because the ruin can be temporally measured, it attains a picturesque quality in which a known causality justifies an ethical aesthetics. In the absence of a clear cause, the ruin reassumes its pernicious role, so delivering it from value in the present. The structural appeal of the ruin is thus carefully balanced between decay and destruction, and past and present. Bernard Tschumi writes: “Death is tolerated only when the bones are white” (Tschumi, 1991, p. 73). The same tolerance arises in decay. Outside of history, the ruin fails to fit in. By breaching a temporal narrative, the ruin becomes an anomaly. Neither fulfilling an objective of the present, nor maintaining a clear aspect of the past, the ruin instead occupies a temporal halfway house. Whereas historic ruins affirm the identity of the present, contemporary ruins appear to detract from such an identity. The peculiarity of urban exploration is that it treats its own ruins aesthetically. How can we explain such a relationship? The overseeing of ruins in the present entails an aspect of voyeurism in which the hidden infrastructure of the city is laid bare. As decay forces the layers of order to buckle, we gain a glimpse of what constitutes that order. Because of this knowing, an isosteric perspective is acquired, which outmodes the previously linear model of concealment. Taken together, decay and exploration are enlightening. At the same time, decay is not a necessary component of knowledge. The attraction of exploring the still active site is undoubtedly due to the power it bestows upon the explorer. The pleasure is twofold. Firstly, by seeing what others do not, namely, the hidden nexus of the city, in its ruined and functioning form, we discover the underside of rational space. Aesthetically, what hides itself only to make itself known in aesthetic experience determines the affect of that experience. The visual aspect is compounded with the epistemological pleasure of knowing what others have yet to grasp. The founder of urban exploration maintains that this knowing binds the act of exploring with an element of authenticity. When I asked what drew him to prohibited spaces, he told me:

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I think the common element that draws me to each of these places—from abandoned buildings to utility corridors to storm drains—is the feeling that I’ve earned myself a glimpse of something authentic, not designed for public consumption. It’s the thrill of getting to peek behind the scenes and see the real situation (dylantrigg.com, 2005).

Going beyond immediate appearances entails an aspect of elevation synonymous with traditional notions of aesthetic experience. This is confirmed in that for Chapman, the “the beauty of authenticity,” though fused with the ruin, nevertheless exists outside of it: I’m not sure if urban explorers have the answers to the problems with cities, but I think urban explorers can help draw people’s attention to what’s good and bad in architecture and design. Certainly going exploring is a good way to get people intimate with places and thus start to care about them. Explorers really do seem to develop a stronger bond with their surroundings (Ibid.).

III The emergence of urban exploration, mirroring the development of fin de siècle decadence, though now without the overt aestheticism, suggests itself as a symptom of history, personifying a mode of temporal engagement with the experience of lived place. Yet the symptomatic expression of decline risks being confused with an ironic celebration of marginal space. Urban exploration distinguishes itself from postmodernist subversion by grounding its identity through assertion and not negation. Instead of employing a drive toward the destruction of a given set of claims, urban exploration tacitly challenges the assumption that what grounds those claims is already implicated by progress in time. Ruins and the underside of the rational ordering of space disprove the assertion that fragmentation and disorder are antithetical to progress and movement. Nietzsche again writes insightfully: “Let us not be deceived! Time marches forward: we’d like to believe that everything that is in it also marches forward—that the development is one that moves forward. Mankind does not advance, it does not even exist” (Nietzsche, 1967, p. 55). In the ruin, time runs off, so becoming timeless. The convergence of temporal categories means that linear progress loses its power of persuasion. We are confronted with an ambiguous space. Time has ceased, yet simultaneously attracts the impression of becoming. The unfolding of ambiguous time, coupled with the affirmation of exposed space, functions as the central momentum for exploration. The significance of the emergence of urban exploration, irrespective of its particular manifestation, exceeds convention. Instead, the active engagement with ei-

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ther decayed or forgotten place, autonomous from the heritage trial, coincides with a broader shift indicative of the end of rational ordering. As rational progress stalls, everyday space, domesticated and imposing, undergoes doubt. In the place of false representation, the unmasking of autocratic space is affirmed in the ruin, whereby decline pronounces itself, so configuring an altered mode of progress. The fixed identity of space, undoubtedly employed as a mechanism of power and suppression, is extinguished as ruination encroaches upon ordered space. Urban exploration, sustained by an aesthetic standpoint, encourages this encroachment by centralizing ruins as a factor of the urban landscape. The representation of decline is made possible through the aesthetics of decay. The macrocosm hinges upon the particular, revealing the disordering of the universal. About this relationship between the one and the many, Spengler was right to admit that a “symbol is a trait of actuality that for the sensuously alert man has an immediate and inwardly sure significance” (Spengler, 2000, p. 87). Urban exploration partakes of this sensuality by being drawn to the space in which rational progress and domesticity have been inverted. In the abandoned factory, there is as strong a presence of the silence of reason as there is in the subterranean tunnel, both of which act as symbols of an overarching process in which the particular shares. While we can see how decayed place challenges rigid ordering, the question remains regarding the attraction of everyday places of activity. As I have already said, exploring the undercurrent of forgotten or hidden place allows us to see beyond appearances. In the exploration, the imbalance between the individual and the collective is resolved by reclaiming delimited place, a tenet central to Situationism. Yet beyond meta-appearances, we discover a deeper bond between the everyday and the decayed place, framed by their ability to recognize the Nothing. Both the departure lounge, as an example, and a derelict factory ally in their collective redefining of presence. In the ruin, the Nothing is brought about by a dynamic that relies upon proximity between decline and collapse. The formal characteristic of nothingness is possible, because the trace of a violent history persists in the still life of the present. The relationship is replicated in everyday space, especially space which occupies an ambiguous placelessness, where the semblance of a definite self-contained presence is lost. In the departure lounge, we are confronted with a gathering of incomplete ends, temporal and spatial. The halflife status of the departure lounge, neither homely nor wholly unhomely, means that it opposes the category of place-world without falling into the role of site. We are, in the meantime, trapped between converging times and modes of altered space.

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Phenomenologically, in spite of the ordered route of the departure lounge, evident in the sequential determination of acts, the spatiality of transition means that we never really occupy any of these determinations. The meantime coincides with the elsewhere. In his outstanding consideration of airport spaces, David Pascoe writes: In such a space, time zones and time lags begin to assume concrete reality; the idea of ‘border’ loses its physicality and reveals itself to be a theoretical construction which can materialize anywhere....such places efface both the past and the future, and leave only the relativity of the present (Pascoe, 2001, p. 34).

The disruption of defined time and space, where Pascoe’s borders undergo radical change, means that dislocation is the result. In the departure lounge, we seek out familiarity, assured that it will reduce the cold space of borderless ambiguity to a pleasingly ironic distance. Knowing that such places are essentially hollow in terms of their content, adapting to the innumerable demands of those who pass through, the absence of particularity proves unsettling. Yet we sail through the departure lounge, endeavoring to project ourselves upon the gray frame. The strange temporality of the lounge is softened as we make it to the airplane. The enclosure of self-contained time, traveling through time, yet simultaneously away from it, creates a lapsed interval. We are in flight, above time, but not beyond it. The motion of passing space means that time maintains its looseness, only now transferred to the body. As jetlag waits to greet us on the other side of motion, the body maintains an uncanny connection with the previous time zone. Hangovers and other ailments remind us of a native context which continues to exist through the body. We take things with us, so being reminded that the occupancy of differing spatial-temporal zones maintains the presence of a now-absent past. Eventually time conspires to catch up, as the body becomes an architectural unit in the same way that old photographs contain a blurred memory. The body, in its lived experience, becomes imbued with the visitation of a strange presence. As our aliments withdraw, the body and its timecontext align. We discover the present, before it too becomes something else. Marc Augé’s excellent book Non-Places is a thoughtful consideration of why ambiguous placeless spaces manage to be attractive and unnerving simultaneously. Establishing non-places as central to the urban landscape, Augé has achieved the task of displacing the postmodern fetish for surface appraisal by replacing it with a space in which the surface never existed. He writes:

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If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place. The hypothesis advanced here is that supermodernity produces non-places, meaning spaces which are not themselves anthropological places and which, unlike Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the earlier places (Augé, 1995, pp. 77–78).

The erasure of a distinct identity means that the non-place presents us with an altered place, though if we are to speak in strict terms, the notion of a non-place is illogical, since a place is already defined by becoming a nonspace. A non-place maintains placeness, which delivers it from an absolute absence of identity. Thus, Augé’s account would be enhanced were he to maintain a distinction between space, place, and non-space. This distinction is realized in that a non-place is really a geometrical space. We see this in how a spatial anomaly is created by not integrating into a temporal landscape. The non-place draws negative attention to itself by opposing placeness in its atemporal and now aplatial status. Lacking what Edward Casey would call “variegations,” it presents itself as a lacuna on the landscape in the same way that the ruin contests space as presence (Casey, 2000, p. 185). The hollowed-out aspect of the non-place is confirmed in that familiarity is cultivated through artifice and pretence. The absence of identity in the departure lounge and hypermarket, to borrow Augé’s illustration, is overruled by the introduction of features and architectural motifs that remind us of a timeless past. In the shopping mall, the desolation of place is not even resolved by the implication of ornate features and mock-historic signs of “tradition.” For Casey, the enforcement of limited space fixed with the lack of spatial distance inside the mall creates the feeling of “ultimate desolation” (Casey, 1993, p. 269). To prove this, Casey asks us to imagine being “locked in a mall overnight, empty of people and featuring only shadowy shops whose windows contain unmoving and unspeaking manikins” (Ibid.). The destruction of place testifies to the aplatial and anti-temporal site that remains. Yet in the exposure of desolation, the unnerving undercurrent of attraction emerges. Sublimity and desolation converge. Casey’s evocation of the mall after-hours is effective, since the image contains a duality in which the manicured ordering of the mall loses its domesticated façade and becomes overtly uncanny. Augé writes lucidly: What he is confronted with, finally, is an image of himself, but in truth it is a pretty strange image. The only face to be seen, the only voice to be heard, in the silent dialogue he holds with the landscape-text addressed to him along with others, are his own: the face and voice of a solitude made all the more baffling by the fact that it echoes millions of others. The passenger through non-places retrieves his identity

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only at customs, at the tollbooth, at the checkout counter. Meanwhile, he obeys the same code as others, receives the same messages, responds to the same entreaties. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations, only solitude, and similitude (Ibid., p. 103).

The dimension of the uncanny reunites us with the ruin, whereby the former life as a place gives way in time to an ambiguous half-space, preserving the past while simultaneously eroding that past. The need to condition non-places preempts the ethics of decay. Like the non-place, the ruin is only tolerated if it slides into a spatial narrative. Only, where the mall and departure lounge seek to conceal their lack of presence by employing homely reminders (or remains), the ruin manages to evade this suppression by delivering us of a fixed identity, even a fragmented one. This discovery of the bond between non-place and the ruin raises the question regarding the pleasure we feel in transgressing linearity. As space is broken down, aesthetic experience becomes viable. We encounter an image that startles us, but only through transgressing the conventions of space is the image sustained. In the departure lounge, mall, and ruin, things begin to fissure. With that violation, an element of eroticism emerges. In my reading of the alleyway, we have seen how the place of decay becomes bound with the dissolute, both as dissipated and degenerative. What we have yet to analyze is the relationship between transgression, taboo, and trespassing.

IV In his meticulous survey of eroticism and transgression, Bataille makes the correlation between desire and taboo, and violence and boundaries. The prohibition of a boundary recognizes the compulsion to destroy that boundary. Yet the prohibition is a double bind, since rather than nullify the desire to transgress, the proscription of boundaries enforces the temptation. Bataille is “even convinced that without the prohibition war would be impossible and inconceivable!” (Bataille, 2001, p. 64). For Bataille, ordered civility creates its own dissolute attraction through inviting the annihilation of repression. By protracting the balance between transgression and collapse, urban exploration exploits this double bind by adhering to the veil of civility, so maintaining the appeal of proscribed space. Without adhering to the conventions of space, non-place and the place of decay would lose their vitality. Yet the construct of civility is not a contrived one: “Each society expects architecture to reflect its ideals and domesticate its deeper fears,” writes Bernard Tschumi accurately (Tschumi, 1991, p. 72). Proscribing “dangerous” space secures the attraction of that space. At the same time, the domestication of space tames our

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fears that boundaries will dissolve. The spatial double bind manages to ease the anxiety of non-linearity, but also maintains enough exposure to that nonlinearity to render it seductive. “Man intended to curb nature when he set up taboos in opposition and indeed he thought he had succeeded” (Bataille, 2001, p. 67). This statement by Bataille applies to the non-place and the decayed place in equal measure. With the non-place, the construction of taboos is visible in the neatly arranged rationalizing of public space. Yellow warning signs and padlocked doors encode space with a language of suppression and, in light of the public climate of “terror,” paranoia. Curbing nature, as Adorno and Horkheimer taught, means domesticating the other. Spatially, the autocratic politics of space risks being disarmed by the ruin. How will the human being curb nature, establishing neat divisions between the homely and the unhomely, when it is of the nature of things to destroy divisions by eroding them? As decay forces things otherwise, the flight into pristine space occurs. Speaking of the revulsion at seeing Le Corbusier’s masterpiece, Villa Savoye, in ruins, Tschumi writes: Those who in 1965 visited the then derelict Villa Savoye certainly remember the squalid walls of the small service rooms on the ground floor, stinking of urine, smeared with excrement, and covered with obscene graffiti. Not surprisingly, the long campaign to save the threatened purity of the Villa Savoye doubled in intensity in the months that followed, and finally succeeded (Tschumi, 1996, p. 73).

Restoration enforces the impression that death can be negated. Simultaneously, it allows the architect to maintain a rational purity, otherwise corrupted through erosion. The urban explorer, entirely attuned to the way in which taboo structures space, enforces the presence of transgression rather than negating it. The implementation of transgression is affirmed in the distancing from “mere” trespassing. Trespassing suggests a limited mode of violation. Yet the negative identity of the trespasser is elemental in the construction of the urban explorer. The specter of the trespasser means that a moral framework is possible in which outright transgression maintains a carefully premeditated distance. The consequence of this distance is that urban exploration fulfills the double bind of spatial taboo by enforcing prohibited space while simultaneously endangering the boundaries that give that space its identity. In truth, however, a love of violation which adopts the appearance of moral distance is needed so that urban decay retains its transgressive undercurrent, a structure summarized by Bataille: “Transgression opens the door into what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains these lim-

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its just the same. Transgression is complementary to the profane world, exceeding its limits but not destroying it” (Bataille, 2001, p. 87). Urban exploration verges toward transgression without ever shattering it. Yet while urban exploration retains a purely inquisitive outlook, whereby exploration is conceived of in moralistic terms, its gradual reliance on a transgressive outlook is inevitable. After Bataille, we realize that high moralism relies on a recognition, and attraction, of low immoralism. The tacit theory of seduction is essential to urban exploration. In the absence of conceptual thought, the “profane” becomes the pivotal force. Thus, the more advanced urban exploration becomes, the greater the need will be to explore decayed, hidden, or forgotten places, not for the sake of overturning rational order, but for the pleasure of audacity. The limited perspective of urban exploration means that the phenomenological reading of ruin goes astray. In the false consciousness of bordered transgression, desire has outmoded the essence of ruin. In the following chapter, the essence will be reclaimed.

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F I F T E E N

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Space and Center: Ruins as Home Domesticity is over, and probably it never existed, except as a dream of the old child awakening and destroying it on awakening. Jean-François Lyotard (1997, p. 277)

I In his The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler propounded a theory of decline determined by the emergence of a specific cultural Civilization. This relationship between a culture and its Civilization is not contingent, but an “organico-logical sequence” in which Civilization forms “a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion…petrifying world-city following mother-earth….they are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again” (Spengler, 2000, p. 24). Spengler’s implicit pessimism materializes through his morphological account of the twentieth century as the dawning of Civilization, an age which consummates itself through Imperialism and economic voraciousness. Here, the “progressive exhaustion of forms that have become inorganic or dead” entails a re-acclimatization to a new way of life, framed by nomadism amid the world-city (Ibid., 25). “We are civilized,” he writes, “not Gothic or Rococo, people; we have to reckon with the hard cold facts of late life, to which the parallel is to be found not in Pericles’ Athens but in Caesar’s Rome” (Ibid., p. 31). Such is the demand that Spengler placed upon the twentieth century that in our age, the “hard cold facts of late life” appear expanded beyond their means. The question of what form exists after Spengler might be unanswerable while we are in the midst of becoming. Yet because of that uncertainty, the impression of sustained being arises. Perhaps history has defied us, we say. The end did not emerge, so we made it through the end. Everything dampened, became solidified, and thereafter grew. Baudrillard, after all, proved that the end was an illusion. Prophecies which engender nervous passion can now be dispensed with. Cassandra remains buried, muted, and unable to speak again. Finally, our continuity in time is vouchsafed by mere existence. This gradual desensitization to endings was evident in accounts of the Hindu apocalyptic myth, the Kali Yuga (the Age of Iron). As with Spengler,

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according to Hindu belief, nature is cyclical and as dependent upon the period of destruction and decay as it is upon growth and fruition. That ours is an age that has entered into the Kali Yuga, as the Hindus believe, is entirely plausible: “Crime walks abroad. Carnivorous animals sleeping in the streets, the vultures are gathering. Birds with iron beaks have been seen crying: ‘It’s ripe, it’s ripe!’”—thus we read in the Mahabharata, bearing striking similarity to post-industrial aesthetics (cited in Gould et al., 1999, p. 100). Notably, as annihilation fails to occur in the Kali Yuga, disappointment is experienced. When the end does not come, narrative familiarity resumes. It is a shame to exist without the boundaries of decline: again we continue the role of mortal rather than martyr. The everyday takes precedence. With it, the melodrama of collapse withdraws. Yet we must not be content to think that the absence of a physical collapse entails a fixed continuity in both space and time. The measure of decline is not always complete extinction. To regard decline as ultimately fulfilling itself in total annihilation, and this alone, would be absurd. The Kali Yuga, entirely adjusted to the cyclical nature of things, postulates a revision of life that need not imply a termination of the source of life. Decline is, nevertheless, a necessary evil that must be passed through. According to the Hindu scripture, the measure of decline is in terms of iniquity, egoism, and materialism: “O king, though Kali Yuga is full of evils, yet it has one great quality—that is, if one practices chanting of Sri Krishna’s holy name alone, one can achieve salvation” (Bhagavata Purana, 1973, 12: 3–51). Salvation from the Kali Yuga justifies the incarnation of evil and, by dint of consequence, the process of decline too. In the present book, the measure of decline is judged, not in terms of its potential to redeem, but with the degree to which reason, and the memory of reason, still exerts its influence upon consciousness. We have rejected reason on account of it being an absent presence that secures the promise of a fixed spatial-temporal site that is able to contain memory. In cultivating sensitivity toward reason’s absence, decline emerges as the pathway of a dissolving progression. That we are living out this dissolution actively means that we have lived through history. The center of reason, now contested, forces the present mode of false movement to withdraw. Because of this inversion of values between reason and decline, what was once regarded as providing a home secured by the claims of reason is manifestly void. We are estranged from history insomuch as the foundation has given way. In the aftermath of rational history, the emergence of decline becomes the figure which defines time and space. Accordingly, as the content of history loses its privileged certainty, so too does the form. Conjoined with the incongruity between the present stage of things and the remains that linger, an anticipatory waiting

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emerges. The beginning of history and the end of history converge, the boundaries ambiguous. In the wavering space in between, temporal uncertainty forms. We have seen in Chapter Five how a state of exile occurs subjectively as consciousness comes to experience itself through recollection alone. The oscillation between the exterior self, being fragmented and essentially partial, and the interior self, being absolute but impenetrable, disunites the center, disrupting the thread of temporal continuity. So long as consciousness remains indebted to its memories for its completion, it stands outside of itself, desiring its dissolution to gain a vantage point on itself. Extended to the macrocosm, history replicates the interior mode of temporal displacement. Sufficiently distant from the end of reason to confirm its collapse, yet not beyond rationality ourselves, we bear witness to a protracted decline, and consequently become decentered by it. Post-history thus means beyond necessity, superfluous to history. Out-of-time and out-of-place, historic consciousness collides with subjective consciousness by remaining indebted to a decayed identity. The lingering and irresolute uncertainty persists. The aspect of disjointed temporality is especially clear in the crepuscular stage of history, whereby the end requires a clear distinction from previous temporal modes. While the end of reason is conceivable, it remains unrealized and potentially unrealizable, since the surging of time perpetually reverts back, gathering the remains of history while still unfolding in the present. The end gathers new life, maintaining an unbroken bond with the fragments which spill between temporal divisions. “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history,” wrote Walter Benjamin (Benjamin, 1977, p. 256). For Benjamin, history does not unfold in a clear and distinct fashion, each age open to dissection. Instead, “the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Ibid., p. 257). The resurgence of time, if vanished, resists destruction. Even the ruins of history conspire to maintain a close proximity to earth and soil through the land. In the untimely landscape of W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, we discover history remerging, repeating, and transmuting itself into its temporal manifestation. The uncanny correspondences that litter Sebald’s words, “when confronted with the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place,” reaffirm the perpetual incompletion of history (Sebald, 2002, p. 3). In Sebald’s landscape, the past creates a disorganized trace. Because of this, associative “correspondences” between discursive subjects and incongruent temporal episodes, no matter how unclear,

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are made possible. The ruins of history contest annihilation and negation. The conceit of deeming history over usually proves premature. Between absence and decline, we discover a nervous freedom marked by the proximity to the Nothing. In its opening, the Nothing collects history from its dormancy and displays the traces in the ruins. Adrift from boundaries which originally determined temporal identity, a nomadic wandering ensues amid the wreckage of familiarity and unfamiliarity (Fig. 13). In M.P. Shiel’s The Purple Cloud, we discover a perfect illustration of this ambivalent adjustment to the return to place after history. When the protagonist, Adam Jeffson, returns from a voyage to the North Pole to find the world deserted, obliterated by an ominous cloud, his reaction is elation yet despair. Realizing that his journey has caused this downfall, the character deems himself cursed and chosen simultaneously. As Jeffson returns to the post-apocalyptic waste of his former London to find death and absence, he burns the city, annihilating the evidence of transgression, so affirming his freedom. Here is a passage which deserves to be quoted at length: I will ravage and riot in my kingdom, I will rage like the Caesars, and be a withering blight where I pass like Sennacherib, and wallow in soft delights like Sardanapalus; I will raise me a palace wherein to stroll and parade my monarchy before the Gods, its stones of gold, with rough frontispiece of ruby, and cupola of opal, and porticos of topaz: for there were many men to the eye, but there was One only, really: and I was he (Shiel, 2000, p. 133).

By transforming the world into an aesthetic object, Jeffson is able to render the unhomely home. The wreckage of history and destruction, evident in the ruin, prove the basis for the character’s renewal. Sculpting the remains of an object into something new proves effortless in Shiel’s novel. Such a position is only tenable once the event is over. The return to familiar places, in which memory is overruled by present experience, is only aesthetic when those places are passed through and their spatial end is encountered. The end of Jeffson’s London is marked by the beginning of its ruin. Unlike Sebald, the collapse is unambiguous.

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Figure 13: The Bethlehem Steel Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

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While the possibility of return is destroyed, the consolation of certainty is gained. For us, the question concerns dwelling in the present and testifying to a temporally incomplete process within that present. The end of rational history encloses time, but does not point to a clearing. Yet dwelling does not fall from possibility because time remains in between forms. The question of dwelling, temporal identity, and decline remains unanswered. This is not a mythical or symbolic question answered in speculative terms alone. Physical space and ontology remain bound. Hence, in answering the question of dwelling and decline, we seek to phenomenologically discover the place of home. In such a place, centrality informs a broader context regarding ontology and history. Bare existence and raw ontology implicate the desire for home. The home the nomad constructs from debris and discards constitutes a confirmation of this desire. Absolute nomadism, even by those who roam deserts and live in the wilderness, is inconceivable. Already the home is created in the choice to leave. With the exiled, the choice to return is contentious and risks danger. Yet the absence of presence means that centrality becomes defined by what is now lacking. Occasionally, the relationship between the center-of-being and the home subverts our logical expectations. In the town of Pripyat, on the outskirts of Chernobyl, Ukraine, the radiation levels are sufficiently high to cause premature and painful death. In spite of this, the occurrence of “illegal” settlers reclaiming their homes in the exclusion zone is common. In nearby Opachichi, elderly peasants return to their homes if only to die in a familiar place, even if contaminated with radiation. For the residents of Opachichi, growing vegetables, keeping chickens, and milking cows, the accident might have never occurred. Homecoming and a sense of place thus discount the threat of danger and death. In the case of illegal settlers residing in the exclusion zone, home necessitates an intimate relationship between the shape of experience and the creation of place. By mirroring each other’s contours, rootless being is evaded as the home is conceived. Equally, the primitive hut and the skyscraper are two ways in which consciousness aspires to affirm what is already being experienced, each an ideology which expresses earthliness and prosperity respectively. The demand of architecture is that it mirrors the nature of things. For Neil Leach, “only an extreme positivist would claim that our reception of the built environment is not mediated by consciousness. The refusal to address the ways in which this mediation takes place is a refusal to address the full question of architecture” (Leach, 1997, p. xiv).

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II If place and temporal identity are bound, now, dwelling can only occur by gathering ourselves amongst the ruins. By this, inhabiting those ruins is not the implication. Such occupancy would destroy the silent quality of the space and demystify its appeal by rendering it a domestic space. Rather, being-athome amongst ruins means recognizing the reciprocity between objective temporality and subjective consciousness, and hence between ontology and aesthetics. In Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” this relationship between ontology and space is rendered explicit when he makes the connection between the sense of “homeland” and the history of Being. Recognizing the estrangement of modern humankind as symptomatic of the loss of the meaning of Being, Heidegger’s diagnosis of homelessness centers around the disorientation Dasein experiences as this loss is identified. We read how, “the homeland of this historical dwelling is nearness to Being…homelessness is the symptom of oblivion of Being. Because of it the truth of Being remains unthought” (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 218–219). Heidegger wrote this passage in the aftermath of the Second World War. The dynamic repeats itself today as objective temporality creates an imbalance between modes of dwelling, so that the organic aspect of being, decay, is overlooked by rational progress. Heidegger alludes to this specter when he speaks of homelessness as “coming to be the destiny of the world” (Ibid., p. 219). For Heidegger, the physical expression of homelessness after the Second World War, with cities in ruin and towns destroyed, was as much a reminder as it was a mirror of the precarious unity between human consciousness and Being. Thereafter, the metaphysical aspect of homelessness found its concrete counterpart. Heidegger’s resolution to the problem of homelessness explicitly materializes in his later essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Heidegger begins by asking under what conditions it is possible for home to be built. The question is asked against the distinction between dwelling and shelter. While truck-drivers reside in the cabs of their trucks, even feeling “at home on the highway,” they do not dwell there (Ibid., p. 323). The importance of the distinction is elucidated when Heidegger, with post-war housing shortages in mind, asks whether, “houses in themselves hold any guarantees that dwelling occurs in them” (Ibid., p. 324). In Heidegger’s analysis, the question of dwelling is contained in the possibility of remaining or lingering. Complacency with language has meant that we have forgotten the original meaning of dwelling, so “dwelling is not experienced as man’s Being; dwelling is never thought of as the basic character of human being” (Ibid., p. 326). The

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elevation of velocity to greatness has also meant that Heidegger’s notion of dwelling as lingering has gone astray. In Heidegger’s prognosis, lingering implies stagnation, even something wholly retrograde. We tend toward movement, even if that movement never gets us anywhere. Unlike Bachelard, Heidegger does not believe that dwelling is a given. For Bachelard, dwelling shelters us before exposing us to the world. In this way, Bachelard, contra Heidegger, inverts the hierarchical dialectic between the ontic and the ontological: that is, what a particular thing is vis-à-vis what it means to be in the first place. Since Bachelard defines well-being in terms of particular places, the relationship between the ontic and the ontological is never addressed. Instead, place is approached in an isolated manner, determined not by ontology, but by subjective imagination. Relying on the imagination to substantiate the illusion of shelter, Bachelard thus values a wellbeing that is not only imagined, but particularized too. A sense of well-being which is particularized means that it does not relate to an Archimedean point of ontology, as Heidegger will suggest, but to the inter-relations we have with space and place. Noting this tendency in Bachelard, Edward Said writes accordingly: “The objective space of the house—its corners, corridors, cellar, rooms—is far less important that what poetically it is endowed with, which is usually a quality with an imaginative or figurative value we can name and feel” (Said, 2003, p. 55). It follows on from this that as long as we accept the home as a given and not produced, the question of it being qualitatively contingent is neglected. Against Heidegger, the emergence of an anxious sheltering is nullified in Bachelard: “Before he is ‘cast into the world,’ as clamed by certain hasty metaphysics, man is laid in the cradle of the house” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 7). The resistance against Heidegger is alluded to, not only in this passage, but also throughout Bachelard’s text. Invariably, part of the reason for this resistance is based on Heidegger’s account of dwelling as learnt and not given. This stands in contrast to Bachelard, where, “life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house” (Ibid.). Such an assertion affirms the priority of the ontic over the ontological at the expense of confusing the two. At stake in the difference between Bachelard and Heidegger’s accounts of dwelling is a relationship between localized place and proximity to the world. The retreat into intimate place does not discount the non-home which threatens to undermine Bachelard’s dwelling. The creation of dwelling in the ruin affirms ontology by exposing dwelling to Being and not only ontic being. This distinction is maintained in Heidegger. Heidegger preserves an account of dwelling framed not by private intimacy, which would reinforce a

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subjectivist relationship to being, but by an intimate proximity to the ground of Being. However, desiring to reside alongside Being means recognizing oneself as being fundamentally estranged from Being. It is a mode of being which is, according to Heidegger, “thrown” into anxiety: “That about which Angst is anxious reveals itself as that for which it is anxious: being-in-theworld” (Heidegger, 1996, p. 176). Heidegger’s use of the term anxiety has the double meaning of being “unheimlich.” Why anxiety is uncanny is because it disrupts our habitual relationship to Being and instead discloses the unfamiliarity of that which hitherto was regarded as familiar. Anxiety is thus a homeless mood in which the sheltering guise of ontic familiarity gives way to ontological uncanniness. That Bachelard did not countenance this dissolution of well-being is hence entirely logical. The claim that ontic well-being is an end in itself is consistent with metaphysical subjectivism. I have made this comparison between Heidegger and Bachelard for the reason that it exposes a fundamental limitation in the latter. Whereas Heidegger prescribes an anxious form of freedom in which one must learn to dwell alongside a sense of ontological homelessness, for Bachelard, the insistence on the primordiality of shelter means that dwelling is ungrounded before the question of dwelling is even raised. Thus, by way of substituting for the lack of a strictly ontological basis, the home is said to be both an end in itself and a beginning of being, while “being ‘cast into the world’ is a secondary metaphysics” (Bachelard, 1994 p. 7). Since Bachelard makes an ontological claim on an ontic foundation, what emerges is a metaphysics of nostalgia whereby the past takes on a significance analogous to Heidegger’s Being. Why Bachelard’s metaphysics is founded on nostalgia is twofold. Firstly, in being a storehouse of memories, the home becomes both the locus of experience and the place of shelter in which dwelling is secured. As a result of this, the home is imbued with a metaphysical significance. Yet being a storehouse of memory does not imply the home being passive. Rather, “it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it” (Ibid., p. 16). Hence, in depending on the absent house for the sake of defining the identity of present experience, Bachelard is obliged to regard the past as elemental in his phenomenology of dwelling. In conceding to the supremacy of original experience, Bachelard aligns the past with what is able to substantiate ontology, namely, Being. It is for this reason that Lefebvre describes Bachelard’s perspective on dwelling as “special, still sacred, quasi-religious and in fact almost absolute space” (Lefebvre, 1991 pp. 120–121). Lefebvre is right in saying that Bachelard’s space is “quasi-religious.” Being immemo-

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rial, Bachelard elevates the past to a fixed Platonic concept, immune to decay. In sanctifying the past, Bachelard places himself in a position where the present is seen to have fallen from the past and thereafter to be striving to ensnare “a poetry that was lost” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 9). That daydreaming becomes the phenomenological tool through which the past is captured is a testament to its disassociation with the present. Yet daydreaming embodies not only a retreat into dwelling, but also a retreat from the present: “it flees the object nearby and right away is far off, elsewhere, in the space of elsewhere” (Ibid., p. 184). Bachelard’s concession to this flight into the elsewhere is hardly surprising. Without it, dwelling would lose its essential inhabitancy and instead open itself up to empty space. Empty space is what the ruin reveals. Yet it becomes empty only inasmuch as we claim that the ruin is determined by what is lost in it. For Bachelard, the creation of memory falters in the ruin, since past experience seldom informs our journey into the ruin. The determining aspect of the childhood home, its pervasive and archetypal presence, means that every new encounter with domestic space is able to find definition. Dwelling and home coincide, but at the expense of solidifying the residue of the past. For Heidegger, past experience does not secure dwelling. Instead, anxiety counters the given status of dwelling. The anxious roots of dwelling figure in his conception of the “fourfold.” The fourfold, consisting of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities, allows the relationship between building and dwelling to be disclosed. Interacting with the fourfold, we discover the richness of being in its finitude: the sky above, the earth below. For Heidegger, both aspects mirror our finitude in their peculiar form: “Mortals are in the fourfold by dwelling. But the basic character of dwelling is to spare, to preserve. Mortals dwell in the way they preserve the fourfold in its essential being…” (Ibid., p. 328). In preserving the fourfold, the place of dwelling opens. For Leslie Paul Thiele, the four-fold is, “a place of limits: limits to perceptions, limits to knowledge, and, most salient, limits to life itself. Being at home in the world is a self-reflective exploration of and living within limits” (Thiele, 1995, p. 179). By identifying our boundaries, dwelling is attained in that negation and limitation reveal the limits of dwelling. Because Heidegger’s conception of dwelling entails lingering, we find that transient space diminishes. While place remains liable to reconfiguration, the involvement of the elements lessens. In shopping malls and departure lounges, our curiosity is aroused by the lack of warmth. Often the absence of presence can prove attractive, so individuating that space from its homogeneity by becoming memorable. The absence of presence means that

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new memories can be created by converting the site to a place. In Heidegger’s analysis, dwelling in the non-place suggests its own failure because of its transience. As Casey notes, dwelling means “stability of place” (Casey, 1993, p. 109). As we have seen in our analysis of the apartment stoop and alleyway, the resistance against dwelling in transient space is due to a lack of temporal consistency. The departure lounge tends to reconfigure itself in the same way that the derelict factory does. Returning to transient space, our memories alter. For Heidegger, this inconsistency appears to preclude the four-fold, and hence, mortality: “mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential nature—their being capable of death as death—into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 329). Architecturally, Heidegger gives the example of a bridge to demonstrate the necessity of delimiting a space to preserve the fourfold. At first, we discover a meadow, undefined by its lack of structure, and with only a stream passing through it. As the bridge is built, a center is established. The banks of the river become beacons against which distance is measured. The human being crosses the bridge, and with it the stream too. In turn, the meadow takes form through the definition of the bridge. Heidegger writes, “it brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream…. [it] gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 331). Acting as a place of locality, the bridge forges a home with its limits. With this construction of the home, particularity is gained. Such an illustration confirms the role of poetic engagement with the world. According to Heidegger, being homeless means being devoid of the ability to approach the fourfold thoughtfully. The further we stray from the original sense of dwelling, the less the chance that appropriating the original meaning of the term will occur. Yet about the future of dwelling, Heidegger is pessimistic. In a speech weeks before his death, he speaks of “the possibility of a transformed abode of man in the world” (cited in Thiele, 1995, p. 180). Heidegger’s concession to a “transformed abode” suggests a form of temporally contextual dwelling, whereby the relationship between home and ontology is built rather than discovered. If this is the case, then the tenability of the fourfold merits reappraisal. Earlier, Heidegger had questioned whether housing guarantees dwelling. He is, we know, more concerned with how we “learn to dwell…in our precarious age” rather than what buildings specifically give rise to dwelling (Heidegger, 1977, p. 339). The presence of the farmhouse in the Black Forest toward the end of “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” is thus an oddity. Despite his claim that “we should not go back to building such houses,” a

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nostalgia for the “farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring [which] did not forget the alter corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed” is clearly detectable (Ibid., p. 338). Heidegger’s wistful evocation of rural life on the German farm reminds us how a mistrust of technology informs his philosophy of dwelling. Servility to technology, he suggests, enforces the idea that homelessness can be evaded through invention and inhabitation together. In Heidegger’s consideration, such a calculation is a crude error marked by the impression of homeliness alone. Reversing this logic of false progress, Heidegger’s model of the fourfold recognizes the domineering facet of technology. In its place, the fourfold is gathered through co-inhabiting the landscape. Already conscious of the fourfold, we are simultaneously aware of the limits it imposes. Dwelling, therefore, becomes the act of caring for these limits without recourse to the work of technology. Elsewhere, Heidegger writes of the infringement of communicative technology in a way that would have appeared nostalgic in his own age: All the things with which modern communication technology constantly stimulates, assaults, and presses human beings are today much closer to us than the field surrounding the farm, the sky over the land, the hourly passages of day and night, closer than habit and custom in the village, closer than the tradition of our native world (Heidegger, 1959, p. 18).

Heidegger’s presupposition is that the rural landscape is more “authentic” than the urban landscape, and that our native dwelling is not in the city but with nature. It is a misconception that history continues to exploit.

III That Spengler would deem the city in a greater stage of decline than the countryside or village confirms Heidegger’s latent fear that technology will encroach upon rural space, and so ruin it. This false equation is that a greater development of decline is more distant from reality than a supposedly “progressive” stage. The truth is the opposite. Through shadowing the gradual descent of the city, the countryside is in the exact same process of decline; the only difference between the two is their proximity to the end and the duration therein. Nevertheless, the belief that the city is in some sense more “dissolute” than the village retains a tacit presence. Writing on the degenerative effect the city has, Spengler is dogmatic:

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The country town confirms the country, is an intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature (Spengler, 2000, p. 246).

That the “gigantic megalopolis” which Spengler describes is striving to become higher than nature is disproved in that nature’s eventual reclamation of the urban landscape will mark the city’s final stage. In abandoned factories where flora and fauna intrude upon concrete and dust, we sense that the city is progressing toward a warped dissolution. On the inside of factories, whose contents have been gradually eroded in the passing years, the divorce between the city and nature is blurred. Summoning up the idea that the city is higher than nature is immediately nullified when we encounter disused machinery, rusted to the point of deformation, with leaves and branches creeping through the porous material. As nature undoes what human beings have put in place, the contingency of the city and the built environment is realized. The realization reminds us that beneath and beyond built place, geometric space retains a durable and final presence. Contrary to Heidegger, in the city we gain a glimpse into how things measure. The velocity of the city means that decline is rapid. With that velocity, the possibility of experiencing the progressive nature of decline is more acute than in the countryside. In an inverted and pernicious formula, Spengler substantiates this point when he writes how the city “is the determinative form to which the course and sense of higher history generally conforms. World-history is city-history” (Ibid., p. 247). The familiar image of the dystopian ideal as the conclusion of the city is appropriate and logical. Because of this logical necessity, the dystopia retains an element of fear, since it involves an annihilation of what we deem as having a sense of place through the involvement of geometrically divided “zones.” The transition from place to homogenous site is irrevocable. Once the particularization of place gives way to the homogeneity of site, the character of the previous place disbands permanently. In a fictional setting, the dystopia employs this fear to aesthetic ends. Often, however, the dynamic between site and place is experienced at levels that are more prosaic. Communities concern themselves over the future development of mass-produced architecture, which threatens to undermine the particular quality of their previous place by rendering it universal. In turn, we fear that everywhere will look the same. The fear is warranted. Despotism and dystopia are synonymous with one another, and the annihilation of not only architectural place-names, but human names too is a necessary consequence. In the shadow of the conversion from place to

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homogenous site, the ruins linger. As communism, to take an obvious example, becomes history, the buildings which once brought about its persistence endure without their spiritual and political counterpart. Like all political exaggerations, a monument such as the Warsaw Palace of Culture is either derided for its historical connotations, as a gift from Stalin, or stripped of its past and so reduced to a kitsch artifice. Hangovers from a previous ideological incarnation invariably lend themselves to justified debasement. Often, the aestheticization of an ideology is enough to constitute this humiliation. If that ideology was already iconic in terms of aesthetic formalities, then outright aestheticism, manifest in kitsch, is possible as ideas and form separate. An undercurrent of erosion thus characterizes the more progressive of our “world-cities.” Between granite and stone, weeds and clover abound. Pristine plazas are countered by the intrusions of flora and fauna. In more developed cities, concrete pavements crack and fissure due to the nitrogen that weeds and alder trees create beneath the surface of the earth. In the absence of rationality, every city street and square would resemble the desolated landscape of Pripyat, on the outskirts of Chernobyl. In Pripyat, the normalization of decay is such that what becomes unhomely is the claim to durability: broken windows, concrete stained with soot, acid rain pouring down upon vacant concrete. Nature too has begun to invest in the future of erosion: redstarts, sparrows, parakeets, and feral dogs roam wildly and sleep beside derelict and irradiated vehicles. The buildings that stand amid the absence, gray and silent, will soon be covered by ivy so dense that it will likely absorb the entire structure. When the presence of reason has departed, gravity takes hold. Buildings and structures composed from steel will begin to dissolve within thirty years, due to the virulence of the rust gnawing upon their frames. Thereafter, only the masonry will remain. In the meantime, the carbon dioxide dissolved in the rainwater will gradually eat away at the alkaline cement until the enclosed steel structures become accessible. In Pripyat, a derelict funfair, motionless in time, with its bumper cars seized by decay and its Ferris wheel catatonic with disuse, is beginning to submerge beneath the ground. Slowly, things have become more distant from their origin, so resembling something altogether novel, a hybrid between motion and collapse. In Pripyat, Heidegger’s fourfold falls into obscurity. Against the abandoned city, we see Heidegger’s position falter by refusing to acknowledge what history proves absolute, namely, the ontological superiority of decline. To concern ourselves with what Spengler describes as the “formless masses [eating] into the decaying countryside with their multiplied barracktenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by clearances and rebuildings” becomes superfluous as the law of ruin

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is followed (Ibid., p. 248). Insofar as this law is denied, preservation takes hold. Heidegger’s philosophy of preservation relies on this denial of entropy because it means that ecology comes to the foreground. Since dwelling remains opposed by immobility, reconfiguring dwelling in accordance with decline becomes an imperative.

IV The temporally contextual foundation of dwelling means that Heidegger’s mode of fourfold is contestable. Preserving the limits of the fourfold is possible only if those limits are undamaged. Historically, the fourfold emerges as a particular instance of dwelling. Preserving temporal dimensions creates a mutation, whereby dwelling is stifled. By falling into spatial normativity, the bridge and river, to borrow Heidegger’s example, lose their definition but gain a sense of temporal solidity. The peculiarity of decayed place is that it does not partake of this solidity. As with the temporal conditions of dwelling, the image of solidity alters in time. Habit and association, as Hume taught, have the ability to confer impressions where ideas lack. Because of this relationship, the structure of the home is able to deviate from its form as a consequence of the home’s persistence in time. By arranging space in such a way that it becomes sterilized (with grime, wood-rot, and dampness safely concealed) interior design is thus structured upon the idea of exclusion and limitation. On the insistence of cleanliness, Freud writes, “we are not surprised by the idea of setting up the use of soap as an actual yardstick of civilization” (Freud, 2001, p. 93). The equation, repressive and false, creates disunity between dwelling and place. Heidegger was right in his assessment concerning the void between being and the environment in which being takes place. The standardized form of living is now ascertained by it autonomy from the organic. After rational history, the inversion of spatial solidity is a legitimate proposition.

V The aesthetic consideration of decay demonstrates that the process of decline is sovereign to the illusion of reason and that in the place of ruin, rational progress disbands. That architectural space replicates the narrative of history is evident from its eventual dissolution. The inability to construct home is undoubtedly a consequence of seeking to evade dissolution. Place and time remain dislocated. The twentieth century lineage of preservation persists in the form of placeless sites which aspire toward autonomy and self-rule. The

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French-Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, initiated this mode of denial against the impermanent by establishing the foundations for Modernism. Thus, for the Dutch group De Stijl, taking inspiration from Le Corbusier, a chief aim was to “abolish natural form [and] eliminate that which stands in the way of pure artistic expression, the ultimate consequence of every concept of art” (cited in Gympel, 1996, p. 87). The manifestation of this position was a complete separation from temporality and mutability. Stripping architecture of its superfluity, De Stijl sought a return to abstraction. The consequence of this move was an austerity that bordered upon the anodyne. That modernist architecture arose in a post-war period where strife, disorder, and chaos threatened the possibility of urban reconstruction entailed its immediate success. In his Terminal Architecture, Martin Pawley writes accordingly: Modern architecture brought order to the built environment. With their design methodology and new technology to match, modern architects made order possible where tradition had buckled at the knees…the capacity to impose order in this way gave architects tremendous authority at a time when neglect, destruction and shortages had reduced much of the infrastructure of daily life to incoherence (Pawley, 1998, p. 122).

After destruction, delayed grief tends to end with a call for rational reconstruction. In the case of Max Nordau, this was prefigured. For Le Corbusier, the De Stijl view is taken to its limit. With his Villa Savoye, we see how thin supports (pilotis) are used in such a way as to divorce the structure from the earth. Erosion is literally overcome by overseeing it. This overcoming is especially pertinent in that Le Corbusier inverted the garden space by conceiving the roof garden. Thereafter, the garden became an artificial paradise in the urban landscape, free of the soil beneath, yet simultaneously able to absorb the natural elements. Writing on the demand of the architect to revolutionize the dwelling, Le Corbusier states how, The primordial instinct of every human being is to assure himself of a shelter. The various classes of workers today no longer have dwellings adapted to their needs; neither the artisan nor the intellectual. It is a question of building which is at the root of the social unrest of today; architecture or revolution (cited in Frampton, 1985, p. 178).

That the Villa Savoye, a home in which Le Corbusier intended to revolutionize housing, did succumb to rot confirms what Tschumi rightly calls “the puritanism of the modern movement [which refuses] to recognize the passing of time” (Tschumi, 2001, p. 74).

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Developing the modernist outlook while simultaneously refining it, postmodernist architecture is an even clearer example of how spatial dissolution is evaded as surface appraisal takes precedence. After the drab exterior of modernism’s puritanism, a re-invention of pluralism became central. Difference for the sake of difference, a celebration of the unity of diversity, and a deliberate dismissal of historical accuracy in favor of historical fantasy all become leading motifs in the postmodernist perspective. Because of this eventual vernacularism, the distinction between presence and absence was lost as playfulness, consolatory and resigned, took hold. Pawley again: “The lack of an organic connection between inside and outside…is typical of postModern architecture” (Pawley, 1998, p. 134). The absence of connection between place and the environment is central to the postmodern outlook. In founding itself upon a “homogenized, de-historicized urban scene,” postmodernist architecture ignores the origins of Modernism and the lineage of destruction therein (Ibid.). After modernity, postmodernism exploits the distance between destruction and time. For this reason, the history of destruction is liable to spatial manipulation and radical interchangeability. The marginalizing of postmodernist architecture, undoubtedly often exaggerated, is due to its untimely quality. Nothing belongs to the postmodernist space. Consequently, nothing is contained within it other than the interplay of surface forms. Postmodernism’s self-conscious desire to either appease or shock, now trite, contributes to the diminishing of postmodernist space. A self-conscious grimace, whether in a painting, a building, or a person, displeases because it reveals the vanity motivating the contortion. This is especially true when that grimace lends itself toward the “grotesque.” While the comical aspect is inevitably heightened, the consequence is bland inanity, as Gympel writes: “Highly contemporary jokes and extreme fashion should be avoided in architecture, because for economic reasons alone its products cannot be changed at the same rate as furniture, clothes or hairstyles” (Gympel, 1996, p. 107). The ruins of postmodernist architecture are already emplaced because the structures persist in time despite the conceptual movement beginning to erode. The consequences of this vernacularism are an inability to correlate space with ontology and moreover a failure to recognize the Nothing as a place of centrality.

VI The flaws we discovered in postmodernist architecture are strengthened by its evasion of decline. The relationship between home, dwelling, and temporal ontology thus remains unexamined. Yet the bond between home, shelter,

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and mutability is intimate and demonstrable in Western history. In Bosch’s depiction of the “Last Judgment” (1504), huddled among the detail, we find scenes of broken homeliness. As the fires of the Apocalypse rage, the doors remain closed and the windows shut. When destruction expands, the metaphysical comfort of the home is realized. For Hegel, architecture “raises an enclosure round the assembly of those gathered together, as a defense against the threatening of the storm, against rain, the hurricane, and wild beasts, and reveals the will to assemble, although externally, yet in conformity with principles of art” (Hegel, 1993, p. 91). Writing on this intimate connection between nature, the universe, and the home, Bachelard also makes the point that the warmth of home depends as much upon the interior layout as it does the coldness of the world. The protecting shelter of the inside is only identified as it is tested by the elements. On Baudelaire, Bachelard writes: Like Edgar Allan Poe, a great dreamer of curtains, Baudelaire, in order to protect the winter-girt house from the cold added ‘heavy draperies that hung down to the floor.’ Behind dark curtains, snow seems whiter. Indeed, everything comes alive when contradictions accumulate (Bachelard, 1994, p. 39).

Being cloistered from danger means that the distance of that danger can be enjoyed. In that aesthetic viewpoint, the nuance of the home takes form as we begin to notice what hitherto has seemed commonplace. The dynamic home, exposed to vulnerability and alteration, re-emerges in the ruin. Only now, the center is in question as space encounters a lack of resistance toward motion. If dwelling requires delimiting space, then in the ruin, the process of becoming undone complicates that delimitation. In his Space and Place, the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan writes pertinently: Home is the center of an astronomically determined spatial system. A vertical axis, linking heaven to the underworld passes through it. The stars are perceived to move around one’s abode; home is the focal point of a cosmic structure (Tuan, 2003, p. 150).

As the “focal point of a cosmic structure,” temporal continuity and spatial limitation are attained. The focal point suggests its own margins by being magnetic. In the center, things converge. Particular place becomes absolute. Hence, we are able talk about the “world-city” as the center of the world. With that claim, other cities, reverberations of the center, fall by the wayside. When removed from the center, estrangement occurs. As the city takes in what the margins are unable to attain, motion is missed out. Thereafter, the city center, the world center, emits the impression of being omnipotent.

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When we approach the ruin, the question of centrality appears absurd. The unfolding inclusion of motion disappears. Instead, the passing of life and the presence of silence crystallize. Outside of the ruin, the world of active life is renewed. Away from decay, we are simultaneously away from inertia. With modern ruins which border the city, the absence of life is acceptable. Often, a cracked window from the ruins of a factory enables us to see the familiar motion we associate with active space. With that combination, decay gathers a detached and secure limit. The closeness to the center is itself central and collectively affirmative. Hence, Yi-Fu Tuan’s claim that the “original inspiration [for] building a city was to consort with the Gods” is present in our contemporary experience with the city (Ibid, p. 150). In today’s cities, the presence of “the Gods” is replaced by motion and sound. What holds the center is the collective hold that space has upon becoming and velocity. In his essay on the hotel lobby, Siegfried Kracauer observed how the anonymity of the lobby has replaced the collective power that the church once held. Kracauer’s essay is played out against a distinction between a collective space infused with the presence of God and a collective space devoid of God. For Kracauer, the hotel lobby is the “inverted image of the house of God. It is a negative church...” (Kracauer, 1995, p. 175). What defines the hotel lobby is its collectivity. Yet it is a collectivity that is united, not by an agreed devotion to God, but instead by the harmonious anonymity: “the hotel lobby,” he writes, “accommodates all who go there to meet no one” (Ibid., p. 175). This “transcendental homelessness” permits Kracauer’s hotel lobby to act as a space in which the center is absent and present concurrently, not “serving a purpose dictated by Ratio” (Ibid., p. 176). Hence, those who inhabit the lobby do so with a detachment from the everyday. They are temporarily relieved of seeking out the good and agreeable for the reason that nothing specific stands out as such. If motion defines the center of becoming, then sound allows us to traverse the center. In the city, sound aids our navigation: “...form in music means knowing at every moment exactly where one is....” writes the musicologist Roberto Gerhard. He continues: “Consciousness of form is really a sense of orientation” (cited in Tuan, 2003, p. 15). That sound defines the structure of space is evident from the values we associate with it. The pleasurable displeasure we experiences while in the center of things—wailing sirens, commotion, an air-conditioning unit whirling into activity—is reassuring insofar as the sound enforces the impression of regularity onto the world. Because of this regularity, we are able to overlook the repetitive quality that these sounds produce. Indeed, our tolerance to sounds is based upon how familiar those sounds are.

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The sounds associated with the post-industrial landscape remind us of a center that exists elsewhere (Fig. 14). The sounds of dereliction, particularly those found in the factory, serve as a threat to the dominant notion of the rational center. In every way, the sound of ruin is marked by what it negates. Hissing, grinding, and distorted drones reverberating without any strict modulation create the impression of defined space coming loose. While the humming drone of a bass timbre can be reassuring insomuch as it provides a foundation, we are more likely to regard it as ominous rather than homely. As the lower notes descend into outright distortion, opposing clean progress, accusations of corruption emerge. Likewise, the weight of being is turgid as the tempo lingers.

Figure 14: The Bethlehem Steel Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle. Sound is narratological. When disrupted by an absence of temporal divisions, sonic ordering is contested. Without an internal logic, anticipating sound is removed. The subversive quality of immeasurable sound has a long history. With Erik Satie’s furniture music (musique d’ameublement), we discover an analogue to the uncanny motion of the hotel lobby. Satie’s idea of furniture music was developed in the 1920s when he composed works that would be played during the intervals as the audience were loitering in the foyer, or at galleries and theatres so that the music would accompany a par-

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ticular exhibition. At the inception of Satie’s musique d’ameublement, audiences were, “[begged] to take no notice of it and to behave during the entr’actes as if the music did not exist. This music...claims to make its contribution to life in the same way as a private conservation, a picture, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated” (Bertin, 1968, p. 60). That the audience ignored the instruction and chose instead to attend to the music does not discredit Satie’s idea. By removing any defining features from the musical form, and instead composing music that is deliberately meant to be ignored, Satie was able to provide a space in which the viewer’s attention could disinterestedly attend to what phenomenologically presented itself without their attention being alerted by musical dynamics. Satie’s music thus fills the awkward silence between the subject attending and the object being attended to. It sifts in between the two aspects so that an environment can present itself which has the appearance of being active. The subversive quality of Satie’s music is reflected in its refusal to grant emotional resolution. Today, the enforcement of sonic minimalism means that industrial sound compels an automated and inhuman value. With the industrial drone, Satie’s furniture music is manifest in a contemporary guise. Temporally, the drone is able to evade the engaging aspect of narrative music by employing a non-linear thread of continuity. John Cage notes insightfully: “Complexity tends to reach a point of neutralization: continuous change results in a certain sameness. It goes in no particular direction. There is no necessary concern with time as a measure of distance from a point in the past to a point in the future...” (Cage, 1976, p. 67). In identifying the lack of temporal direction in the drone, Cage has diagnosed why pieces such as Satie’s musique d’ameublement mirror the hotel lobby and urban ruin. Both places are indifferent to the subject’s idiosyncratic desires, but instead facilitate an environment in which placidity and idleness can give rise to a detached consciousness which is removed from a utilitarian context, so allowing consciousness to disinterestedly absorb the passing of motion, form, and phenomena. As the distorted drone is suppressed, power is measured in silence, not sound. The contemporary office and factory operate so as to subdue the process of manufacturing, rendering it a sterilized operation in which the residue of waste and infertility is forgotten. In this way, the absence of sound is associated with productivity, streamlining, and aesthetic satisfaction. That the silence is false is realized as productivity falters, causing the familiar cranking of jarred parts to become palpable. In comparison, the image of the dystopian landscape, torn by havoc and now played out in ruined and abandoned factories where rival factions strive to colonize each other’s territory, enforces the

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negative role that post-industrial sound plays while simultaneously reinforcing the place of decline as a place of detritus

VII This evocation of dystopian sound is not confined to the future possibilities of an unformed dystopia. It is already present in empty factories where the decayed artifacts create their own peculiar sound. Among objects which are derided for being either ugly or inhumane, the machine is most apparent. We can ascertain three distinct stages in which the regard for the machine is gradually lessened, while our fear is simultaneously heightened. In the first instance, a resistance against the machine emerges because of what it outwardly represents: a gradual dehumanization of Being, humans becoming units, and thereafter being measured in terms of their production alone. The fear was grasped during the incipient stages of the Industrial Revolution by the dissidents who foresaw the dangers the Revolution might bring. Thomas Carlyle writes thus: Men are growing mechanical in head and heart, as well as in hand…their whole efforts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical character…this faith in Mechanism, in the all-importance of physical things, is in every age the common refuge of Weakness and blind Discontent; of all who believe, as many will ever do, that man’s true good lies without him, not within (Carlyle, 1969, pp. 63–80).

For Carlyle, the machine embodies the furtherance of what is essential to humanity, so that a pathway is created in which the machine becomes an encroachment and not a benefit. The initial reaction against industrialism was not an aesthetic resistance against iron and steel, or as it would later be, reinforced concrete, but a rejection of what symbolically embodied the undifferential and so inhuman. This concern that the machine is a threat is accentuated as the machines of the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution morph into the more advanced machines of the early twentieth century. In Spengler, secondly, we find the suspicion of machines compounded with a belief that they symbolize a further stage in world decline. With the arrival of the “Faustian soul,” the desire to dismantle the limits of exploration—in Heideggerian terms, the fourfold—means that outright reverence to nature is broken. The steam engine, according to Spengler, is the first instance of Faustian soul disrupting the harmony between humanity and nature: Till then Nature had rendered services, but now she was tied to the yoke as a slave, and her work was as though in contempt measured by a standard of horse-power. As

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the horse-powers run to millions and milliards, the numbers of the population increase and increase, on a scale that no other Culture ever thought possible. This growth is a product of the machine… (Spengler, 2000, p. 411).

Spengler’s pessimistic outlook on the machine is determined, firstly, by the fear of dehumanization, and secondly, by the intensification of the Faustian soul, the conclusion of which is closure. Spengler is intent on chronicling a necessary pathway and not, contrariwise, aspiring to diagnose its resolution. That the desire to overcome nature is a symptom of the Faustian downfall does not render it immune from a bleak outcome, whereby “man has become the slave of his creation” (Ibid., p. 412). Writing of the marginalization of the “lesser” worker, Spengler’s humanism is unusually clear: The peasant, the hand-worker, even the merchant, appear suddenly as inessential in comparison with the three great figures that the Machine has bred and trained up in the cause of its development: the entrepreneur, the engineer, and the factory-worker (Ibid.).

At stake in Spengler’s claim is a reiteration of the un-differential, that is, the mechanization and eventual dissolution of the hitherto accepted notion of humanity, which the encroachment of the machine entails. Finally, in the later work of Lyotard, Spengler’s proclamation of the human being becoming a “slave of his creation” is drawn to its logical conclusion in the form of artificial intelligence. Against the backdrop of the machine, Lyotard is unexpectedly forthcoming in his overarching ethical stance, affirming a moral post-humanism whereby the old humanism with its Faustian desire to overcome nature is replaced with a resistance against the arrival of a technologically orientated inhumanism. For Lyotard, the threat of the machine is tenable through the prospect of “heat death,” that is, the projected death of the universe when it has reached a maximum state of entropy. This is a process that our sun is already going through. According to Lyotard, artificial life, driven by technology now being engineered, will be programmed to continue life beyond the point of heat death, resulting in a posthuman existence constituted by distinctly inhuman entities. For Lyotard, this is a laudable cause to resist. If realized, the inhuman would overwhelm humanity through duplicitous scientific means. At the same time, a legitimatized resistance against the inhuman would be instigated as the war between the machines and the humans arose. Lyotard’s notion of inhumanity thus entails a projection of an immanent but unfulfilled entropy. The inhuman provides a foundation for a resistance, not billions of years away, but in the present where biomedicine and advanced technology are al-

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ready a threat. With echoes of Schopenhauer’s ceaseless will, Lyotard writes of technology as having an unquenchable thirst for technological development. In turn, this propensity toward development will extend to the point where development for the sake of development outmodes the original end. Technology, suggests Lyotard, will cultivate values that no longer correlate with the impetus which gave rise to them in the first instance, hence harvesting a life in which the humane is dissolved and the artificial celebrated. We can already see the influence that the artificial has over the organic in bio-medical practices such as life-support machines. It is a life after life, an uncanny existence in which the familiar compounds with the unfamiliar. The same is also true of life beyond the dissolution of the sun. It would be a world, according to Lyotard, inhabited by artificial life, life suspended by machines. In a word, it is the same fear seen in Spengler and Carlyle: the fear of the non-differential. Spengler was the first to recognize that this eventual colonization of machines would render human beings servile to them. In Lyotard, the doubt is confirmed through the presence of artificial life/intelligence. Now, we exist in loose co-operation with artificial life. The question of being obedient to its will, however, looms ominously. Lyotard writes: “It is not true that uncertainty (lack of control) decreases as accuracy goes up: it goes up as well” (Lyotard, 1991, p. 38). Broadly, we become more reliant on machines the higher we place our trust in them. Architecturally, the relation between heat death and place is clear. It is analogous to the desire to transcend decline through conceiving of “thought without a body” in the same way that restoration conceives of immobile space founded in arrested decay: that is, as uncanny place. What is uncanny lacks a definite center. Yet it is a place in which the impression of homeliness resides, as an artificial life. “How to make thought without a body possible” is a serious issue for Lyotard, which he deems science as catering for. The implications, as they were with Spengler, are a binary opposition that fails to embrace ambiguity: “So: the intelligence you’ve been preparing to survive the solar explosion will have to carry that force within it on its interstellar voyage. Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable differend of gender” (Ibid., p. 22). Resisting the inhuman, we are simultaneously resisting the space of immobility and non-difference. For just as the drive toward delaying heat death compels us to engineer machines that are capable of prolonging artificial life, so the space in which the organic is supplanted relies upon a similar binary logic, whereby the different gradients of erosion are arrested. In sterilized factories and supermarkets, the working of the machine appears to have vanished. Withdrawn into silence, the supermarket occupies a

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position of autonomy. As the seamless operation of the supermarket is sabotaged, the presence of the machine stands out. Recall the malaise surrounding the Millennium “bug.” During the crisis, the fear was that machines would fall into exhaustion by being unable to cognate digits. With the trepidation that the supermarket freezer would cease to generate power, so rendering its contents useless, this fear was embodied. The structure of the dread is thus that a maximum state of entropy had been reached, and that with it, concession to decline would have to be confronted.

VIII Because of the associations of inhumanity and sterility, Lyotard resists the machine, claiming the industrial as “the inhuman side of the mechanical” (cited in Richter, 1965, p. 107). For Lyotard, the threat of the machine is only made tenable against the possibility of a future dissolution, namely, heat death. While such a prospect is remote, the dynamic it introduces is replicated in the interaction between dereliction and decline. In preparing for a future in a climate of fear, paranoia emerges regarding the embryonic possibilities of the machine, evident in its potential to destroy. Likewise, the encroachment of spatial decay upon the civil landscape is quickly converted, restored, or simply razed to the ground on account of its destructive nature. The motivation behind both suppressions is the same: a desire to resist displacement from the center of things and so retain a sense of place, whereby things converge rather than disband. The fallout of this endemic perspective is a distaste toward machines, and so abandoned, ruined and decayed structures, each of which shares in the machine aesthetic, and a broad desire to house ourselves in such a way that their presence is wholly negated. The aspiration toward an environment in which industry is absent is founded upon the supposition that the urban center is the ontological center. That this is false is evident from what negated civility entails, namely, decline. How do we begin to measure what counts as the center? Movement alone is no guarantee. An intensification of movement can often highlight the inertia with which space actually rests. The machines and industrial wastelands are avoided, because they seem extinct. But does extinction entail an absence of what is central and related to the shape of things? If we are to concede to the absence of reason, then the space in which tradition, preservation, and restoration prevail cannot be regarded as being central. A center is a place in which the momentum of forces converges. The center is, to again use Tuan’s expression, the “focal point of a cosmic struc-

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ture.” But this focal point can only be experienced in a place in which energy is moving of its own accord and not merely vouchsafed in terms of a gathering of people, or preserved to adopt the appearance of being mobile and therefore progressive. Our gradual recognition that the place of decay is the center of things is dependent upon our ability to dispense with the view that we denote the center, and not the objective space around us. True: we tend to feel that we are at the center of things. But it is as much a compulsion toward security as it is toward space itself that gives rise to the feeling of centrality. We are at home in the world so long as we regard ourselves as being protected by the center. As long as that belief is held, the possibility of acquiring a sense of stability can be maintained. Yet the stability is precarious. When pushed, the fall is swift. The unreserved collapse testifies to the center’s deception. The “reality” of the center, so far a shelter, proves itself to be unreal as it fails to align with suppressed reality. To regard the ruin as unreal means identifying it as real, existing, as it paradoxically does, outside the parameter of the regulated center.

IX Let us envisage ourselves in the ruin of a derelict factory (Fig. 15): empty halls with high vaulted cement ceilings, peeling wallpaper tearing itself from the fabric of concrete and steel. We discover shards of fibers strewn in the dust and sand beneath the ground, massive inert cogs motionless and covered in the discards from passing wildlife. Shattered glass forms a makeshift pathway to the administrative center, where long shadows peer over what was once the bureaucratic core of the factory. Where desks and neatly compiled paperwork existed, there now stand upturned chairs and puddles of burnt debris. Replacing the floor is a pool of water, in which floats an eroded tire. On the other side, boarded-up windows prevent the light from seeping in, but beneath the floor streams of light shoot forcefully from the fragmented boards of wood. Outside, motionless conveyer belts, encroached upon by wildlife, their inertia a testament to the life which now grows in the ruin. Cavernous tunnels, imploded roofs, concave funnels, fallen objects now stationary on the floor beneath, all of which unite in their aesthetic splendor.

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Figure 15: Lime Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

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It is a center in which the uncanny takes precedence. We discover fragments long forgotten, the remains of a time in which activity and engagement with work pre-dated the place of decline. Things that are familiar outside of the ruin suddenly take on the appearance of being foreign, otherworldly, and unreal. The personal details discarded by absent workers lie passively among the debris, their abandoned state symbolic of a privacy that is nevertheless felt by those who are alien to it. We slowly grow intimate with these decaying details each time we return to the place. The volatile disjunction between the synthetic and the organic entails a destructive beauty, whereby a violent “tearing-away” has the effect of elevating us from the space of everyday perception. With this loss of volitional consideration, the senses have the inverse consequence of becoming heightened. Knowing that the walls could give way, or that a shard of glass might fall from above, hypersensitivity occurs to the danger and beauty of the ruin. As we feel the soft floor beneath, we know that the slightest pressure might cause its downfall. In the ruin, walking slowly is not only a way of absorbing the space intimately; it is also a necessity. With this ponderous pace set, the feeling of being embodied in a way that seems accentuated is a natural consequence. We feel compelled not to infringe upon the silence. With every inhalation, a tension arises that our exhalation and movement will unnerve dormant beings. Actions take on the appearance of being momentous. Such affects are not limited to visual stimuli. Smells too create a distinct impression. In the factory, the severance of objects from their original context is accompanied by the distinct odor that they leave behind. The negativity of these smells is not only comprised from the fact that their origin is absent, but is also framed by the fact that they permit odors which are otherwise suppressed in regulated existence. Ammonia, asbestos, damp plaster, moist wallpaper, wood-rot: these are the smells that civil existence seeks to subdue through sterilization and domesticity. The presence of these odors, still lingering despite the absence of their origin, creates a sense of vivid disembodiment: a trompe l'oeil that gives rise to an apparition experienced but not seen.

X In neglect, the derelict place has become a center in which organic movement flows of its own accord, freely and able to succumb to erosion without disruption. Things can converge and dissolve without a preservative agenda. As a result of this disregard, the ontological value of the ruin becomes clear. The ruin destroys artifice. Instead of false motion determining centrality, in the

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ruin, the dynamic between the absence of presence and the lingering resonance of violence, which I have termed the Nothing, becomes the center of things. We witness the shape of history, from the canonization of reason to its successive failures and thence to its gradual demise unfolding in spatial form. We see the correlation between solidity and progress give way to disintegration, rot, and erosion. We are at home among the debris. The ruin soothes us through reinforcing what was already present, albeit latently. By embodying the pathway from incipience to extinction, the ruin theatrically reenacts the structure of our age. After modernity and postmodernity, the ruin mirrors the gathering of closures. The final movement of the ruin is a rebirth that will exist only in the absence of its being. For us, tending to its disappearance is enough. The ruin as a home is realized the nearer we hold out into the Nothing. In the process of internalizing what the ruin symbolizes, we recognize the drive toward collapse. The “hard cold facts of late life” have been placed upon us. Ours is an age whose virtue is our nearness to the end.

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Memories in Ruin Some would even fall in on purpose if they got too close to the Nothing. It has an irresistible attraction—the bigger the place, the stronger the pull. Michael Ende (1983, p. 20)

I The aim of this work has been to outline a spatialized impression of the Nothing from the perspective of self-consciousness. Insofar as we have found this impression arising in the space in which decline gives way to dissolution, we have succeeded in this task. Studying Heidegger’s original text, we found ourselves questioning his correlation between anxiety and nothingness. From this, we discovered that silence, especially when it is preceded by violence, reveals the Nothing. In the place of decay, this dynamic between violence and silence is evident. What constitutes the preceding violence spatially is the veneer of reason, which, as we demonstrated, leaves an absence in which decline is shown to be ontologically superior. Applying this to the field of architecture, we were led to regard the region of decay as a place of ontological worth. In the midst of ruin, the process from inception to extinction was discovered in its entirety. The task which now remains is to assess the future of the ruin. To answer the question, we will be required to ask what ought to be done with the ruin as a physical structure. If reason centers around a progressive march toward the permanent, then the ethical approach of restoration or conservation must be held in question, as such an ethic would entail an outright suppression of the ruin’s essence. With each stage of manipulation the ruin undergoes, it gradually distances itself from its original inception until it is rendered an artifact, the significance of which is entirely negated. We will explore the full implications of this distortion before outlining an ethics founded not in restoration and remembrance but in reclamation and forgetfulness. Let us consider how the future of the ruin depends upon its original purpose. That the fate of ruin—that is, its eventual dissolution or restoration—is dependent upon its original function is evident in the image of the historic monument, especially when that monument has a national or historic interest. Whereas the status of urban ruins, such as asylums and derelict factories, is contentious in terms of their historic importance, and they are thus more li-

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able to more liable to dissolve by neglect, the importance denoted by the monument’s historic conception entails that it ought to endure, acting as a testament to a given age or event. “Monuments are more or less monstrous exaggerations of the requirement that architecture be permanent”—so writes Robert Harbison accurately (Harbison, 1991, p. 37). In light of what French historian Pierre Nora has termed “the acceleration of history,” whereby the tradition of memory is displaced by the insertion of sites of memory, monuments come to embody the seizing of time, reinforcing the objectification of memory simultaneously (Nora, 1989, p. 7). The acceleration of history, now aided by electronic archiving, means that monuments, together with a broader monumental impulse, intercede between the mutability of time in the present and the loss of time in the past. “An increasingly rapid slippage of the present,” Nora writes, “into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear—these indicate a rupture of equilibrium” (Ibid.). The monument stands beside both dimensions, creating a halfway house in which the impression of temporal continuity, and thus restored equilibrium, is gained. In ethical terms, the persistence of the monument coincides with the event the monument “contains.” Since the monument makes a claim to intimacy with the past, the ethical imperative to conserve the monument derives from the insistence on temporal continuity. Out of this ethical dimension, the aesthetic counterpart of the monument is established. The German architect Friedrich Tamms wrote: It must be rigorous, of spare, clear, indeed classical form. It must be simple…it must transcend everyday utilitarian considerations. It must be generous in its construction, built for the ages according to the best principles of the trade. In practical terms, it must have no purpose but instead be the vehicle of an idea. It must have an element of the unapproachable in it that fills people with admiration and awe. It must be impersonal because it is not the work of an individual but the symbol of a community bound together by a common ideal (cited in Hinz, 1979, p. 236).

Tamms’ description succinctly captures the central tenets of monumentality: unity, mediumship, and desire for posterity. Able to communicate a singular moment in time from one generation to the next, the presence of memory is such that an event can be elevated to mythical proportions when the landscape and the monument have fused to become indistinguishable from one another. By furnishing the landscape with a narrative of history, monuments provide place with an identity. In this way, the abstract and seamless quality of history is cultivated into arbitrary divisions, providing a chronology that would be lacking were monuments absent. Without monu-

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ments, place prima facie exposes itself to temporal uncertainty. Lacking a temporal standard, space and place would appear atemporal, and so devoid of identity. Instead, “monumental space,” writes Lefebvre, “offered each member of a society an image of that membership, an image of his or her social visage. It thus constituted a collective mirror more faithful than any personal one” (cited in Leach, 1997, p. 139). The monument confers a narrative upon history, an identity sculpted in the landscape which renders time solid. Yet the origin of historic interest imbued in the monument is not always deliberate. In his essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Alois Riegl makes the distinction between intentional and unintentional monuments. According to Riegl, an intentional monument is “a human creation, created for the specific purpose of keeping single human deeds (or a combination thereof) alive in the minds of future generations” (Riegl, 1982, p. 21). The determining quality of the monument is its premeditated intent. By “claiming to immortality, to an eternal present and unceasing state of becoming,” the essence can linger only while the surface of the monument retains its outward appearance (Ibid., p. 38). Encountering the Monument to the Warsaw Uprising, we recognize a moment extracted from history. The monument establishes an “eternal present” in which the time of defiance is frozen. The symbolism of this defiance is reinforced in the physical properties of the monument. That the monument exists alongside he modern Supreme Court, itself a monument of glass and mortar, only affirms the original meaning of the structure. With the Monument to the Warsaw Uprising, symbolic significance does not need deciphering. A marker of spatial and temporal events, it conveys a communicative quality, the justification of which is implicit in its existence. For Riegl, however, the majority of our monuments are unintentional and have had the status of monumentality conferred upon them through nostalgia or a reappraisal of history. The gradual appreciation of classical ruins in the Middle Ages is an example of history re-defining conventional symbolism. The decision to convert the ruin to the monument became central as Rome’s ruins began to vanish. Riegl writes: The historical value of a monument arises from the particular, individual stage it represents in the development of human activity in a certain field...the more faithfully a monument’s original state is preserved, the greater its historical value: disfiguration and decay detract from it….it is the task of the historian to make up, with all available means, for the damage nature has wrought in monuments over time (Ibid., p. 34).

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After Riegl, we need to establish a distinction between historic and ontological value. For Riegl, the monument’s worth is that it is able to communicate historic values temporally. For that communication to occur, a suspension of the ontological aspect of the built environment must be negated or denied its absolute status. Whereas monuments that convey a resistance against oppression necessarily resist temporal erosion, monuments that convey failure or decline do not, broadly, proceed to erode also. The timeless quality of the monument is such that it conveys a timeless content and a timeless structure. To have one without the other would render the monument a ruin. Riegl’s unintentional monument can also be seen when a monument loses its status as a monument only to become celebrated as an antimonument, which then renders it a meta-monument. The toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue as the American army invaded Iraq during the second Gulf War is a dramatic example of what happens when a monument loses its potency and is reduced, symbolically and physically, to an inverted monument. A similar inversion occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Tallinn, Estonia, the monument of Lenin was hung by the neck. In Kiev, he was dethroned and then caged. “The toppled statues,” writes Svetlana Boym in her excellent The Future of Nostalgia, “were left lying on the grass, abandoned to natural decay and casual vandalism….the monuments lying on the grass turned into picturesque ruins. If the monuments to the leaders had helped to aestheticize the ideology, their ruins revealed its perishability. No longer representing power, the monument reflected only its own fragile materiality” (Boym, 2001, p. 84). This dynamic, whereby a once celebrated object is reduced to an object in which the negativity of its essence becomes a source of aesthetic and symbolic appreciation, is replicated in a space that has been determined by tragedy or violence. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, the physical site of Ground Zero, New York became—and has remained—a monument to those whose lives were taken by the acts of terror. While the site remains unformed rubble and formed absence, the monument is a discomforting presence because the loss of security has yet to turn to resistance. The plan, therefore, to erect massive skyscrapers exceeding the original Twin Towers embodies the belief that a monument can emerge from a ruin, and thus act as a symbol to commemorate the space of tragedy. In the case of monuments created by chance, we see how a particular experience can define their status. Created monuments, which presuppose mediation, appear to evade a direct experience. In lieu of this experience, how do they then become temporally imbued, able to testify to past events, and

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not mere things? By enforcing associations upon the monument, temporal continuity is established in the absence of direct experience. Monuments become recognizable as monuments largely through convention. The entrenchment of associations such as power, victory, or suffering entails that meaning can be instilled into physical matter. Often, the associative relationship between a monument and its subject is explicit to the point of being crude: Mount Rushmore, South Dakota is an example. The relationship the landscape has to the figures carved in the stone is at best incidental. Despite this, the land itself is determined by the association enforced upon it. About the content of the association, the government website is equally unambiguous: The sheer size of the mountain carving on Mount Rushmore evokes a sense of awe in those who view it. We are also amazed when we see ourselves in the faces of the presidents. The four presidents carved in stone represent all Americans. They represent our courage, dreams, freedom, and greatness (http://www.nps.gov/moru/, 2005).

Generally, association relies on architectural and geometrical features of the monument, rather than explicit declarations of intent. The appearance of temporal depth is often achieved by the employment of archetypal features such as pillars, columns, and arches, which are meant to designate triumph. The simplicity of these features, together with the absence of ornament, leaves a space in which the memory trace can be conveyed. Riegl’s “unceasing state of becoming” is achieved by the monument’s atemporal status. The monument seeks to monumentalize timelessness and universality by refusing idiosyncrasy or particularization Psychologists and cognitive scientists who debate memory and its retention are prone to ask what happens to memory while it is in storage (cf. Schacter, 1995). The same question can be asked concerning the temporal continuity of monuments: how is the preservation of a representation of the past possible without altering the content of the past through the act of preserving it? This reconstructive preservation is a physical resistance against decay and solidification of meaning. For the monument to endure as a monument, the past needs to be altered to prevent it from losing potency. Renewal is inherent to the survival of monuments. Devoid of relevance to the present, monuments become ruins. Yet renewal is often hampered by temporal distances. While historic anniversaries can remind us of origins, once the anniversary has passed, the monument resumes its dormant state as a relic. Likewise, memories that are suddenly recollected can prove emotive. Yet the emotive quality of the memory is usually founded in the act of recollection rather than the memory itself. The curiosity aroused by the possibility of a

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storehouse outweighs the curiosity we take in the content of that storehouse. What happens to monuments when they fall from collective attention? The historian Carl Becker speculates: In the lengthening perspective of the centuries, even the most striking events…must inevitably, for posterity, fade away into pale replicas of the original picture, for each succeeding generation losing, as they recede into a more distant past, some significance that once was noted in them, some quality of enchantment that once was theirs (cited in Lowenthal, 1985, p. 240).

Thereafter, the fate of the monument is inevitable: either it succumbs to kitsch pastiche and is rendered a commoditized “attraction” or, more positively, it acquires the status of a mere thing, the function of which is to signify geometrical distinction within an urban or rural landscape. The identity of monumental space is framed not by the imprint of memory, but by the emplacement of inert objects. That these objects lack definite historical meaning is realized by their consignment to the role of elaborate geometrical markers, in the same way that remembering the location of distinct places, cafés and bars allows us to navigate our way in a foreign city. Orientation is secured, not through temporal identification with a place of memory, but through the monument acting as a public sign, whose value is that we can situate ourselves by establishing how near or far we spatially reside from it.

II The success of the monument depends on its ability to communicate a specific memory from one age to another. With the decline of any firmly held theological, indeed teleological, belief in the West, and with secularism becoming synonymous with a progressive form of liberal democracy, the need for objects to convey a complex relationship between temporal events becomes requisite. Heritage takes the place of previous modes of spiritual engagement. Now, the “ineffable” emerges as the thread of temporal continuity. If our values are weakened, then our reliance on objects is intensified. Monuments provide a convenient measure of time passing, a practical method to maintain our bond with the past. That they are images of the past, which obliges us not to doubt their accuracy, does not matter. Residue, even if false, is preferable to a nomadic atemporal placelessness. The danger, however, is that monuments lose their ability to accurately convey a memory, and so glide into pastiche, or become entangled in the heritage industry. “The monument-idea,” writes Miles Glendinning, “has been one of the modern age’s most powerful and alluring substitutes for reli-

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gious mysticism and eternity—but it has now been taken to an extreme which has exposed its ultimate emptiness” (Glendinning, 2001, p. 17). The conclusion of our infatuation with monuments is the possibility of a revisionist account of history. The heritage industry has been particularly favorable in enforcing the impression that a monument must endure. The impression that we are most familiar with is that of the timeless and not transient monument. We shall now examine the danger of this impression, its essential inaccuracy, and the effect it has upon our notions of progress.

III Preservation of the built environment coincides with cultural pessimism. The aspect is twofold. Firstly, the historical content imbued in the monument is deemed valuable, and so symbolically rendered permanent. Secondly, as urban ruins fail to distinguish themselves in terms of harmony and symmetry, a decision is made to convert them into monumental but usable structures. Both of these impulses deny progressive decline and are exasperated by cultural pessimism. In the present section, the relationship between pessimism and preservation will be explored. If events define an age, then the values that those events affirm or deny reinforce the state of that age. After the twentieth century, even the most lapsed rationalist tends to preserve faith. Renouncing hope in the future of reason would mean recognizing the failure of the previous resistance and the victory of historical destruction, that is, a resignation without profit or progress. We continue to negotiate with reason because we suppose resolution can be crafted. Let us remember the strange thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. According to Fukuyama, the disintegration of the Eastern bloc in 1989, and the ensuing development of splintered liberal capitalist democracies, confirmed that history is over, and with it, the last stage of evolution met. History has neither disproved nor exaggerated Fukayama’s thesis. It has only confirmed the thesis in the shape of Western imperialism. Those who deem progress their right seek zealously to convert, heal, and restore the fissures in which dogmatism has yet to “flourish.” Progress means keeping an eye on error while eradicating the origins of dissent. The nostalgia for the future informs the endurance of the unfinished present and makes that present bearable. In political terms, the failed promise that the next term of government will bring about improvement relies on the same logic. The deferment of progress means that democracy thrives as political power gains an increasingly manipulative hold on the “electorate.”

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Yet as the sense that things have deviated from their original configuration intensifies, the desire to restore that corruption gains enthusiasm. Ecopessimism is the archetypal example of what happens when a culture becomes aware that hope is precarious and seeks to materialize memory. The impression achieved from this materialization is of unity, stability, and growth, where only discontinuity exists. The endeavor to restore what is tarnished reveals a close parallel with the nineteenth and twentieth century fear regarding the advent of technology. Environmentalism realizes that progress is a double bind, relying on the advancement of nature-wrecking machines for the sake of overall development. The implication of such destruction is a dehumanized world in which nature is rendered sterile. The point of departure for the environmentalists is a philosophy that replaces the nineteenth century fixation on science contra humanity, and posits a form of resistance defined in terms of humanity contra nature. The war between humanity and nature manifests itself as an acute awareness of the corrosive factors of a synthetically formed nature. Acid rain, a concern which originally gained momentum in the 1980s and has since withdrawn from interest, illustrates how nature has deviated from its norm by becoming destructive to the environment. As if to prove this deviation, the material consequences of acid rain are often targeted against the very thing environmentalists seek to preserve. In his Cultural Pessimism, Oliver Bennett explains: “With an acidity in some cases equivalent to vinegar, it destroyed vegetation, injured forests, killed fish populations, corroded metal and weathered stone buildings and monuments” (Bennett, 2001, p. 25). The idea that nature had turned sour through abuse echoes Spengler’s proclamation concerning the appetitive aspect of the Faustian soul. In desiring mass production, human beings have had to make recourse to pesticides, synthetic chemicals, non-renewable resources, and nuclear energy. The awareness of decline emerged when people realized that such influences were establishing a volatile pathway that might never be repaired. Now, hope has been displaced into posterity, where we believe that future generations will be able to create new forms of technology and synthetically engineered natural resources to amend the previous generation’s errors. The cycle of aspiration, failure, and ruin is inevitable and largely uninterrupted. Environmentalism is pessimistic because it laments what has passed while simultaneously remaining critical of what human beings are still doing to the environment. Hence, it suggests an impulse that again imagines an unconceived (and inconceivable) future. The recognition of an environment in decline becomes pronounced as malaise hardens. Appearances force environmentalism to rethink how we are

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interacting with nature. But beneath appearances, a deeper dissatisfaction with the shape of being is found. The tacit awareness that expectation and experience refuse to align is at the center of cultural pessimism, whether environmental, political or sociological. Exactly what is expected is restoration; what is experienced is failure. This fundamental incompatibility occurs because pessimism relies on the notion of progressive reason cultivating a “golden” future. What environmentalism does identify correctly is the supposition that the human being is a privileged type of being from an ecological perspective. We tend to think we have mastered the environment through being conscious of it as “separate” from ourselves. Self-consciousness is often seen as the guarantor of this divide. Because of this supposed autonomy, a secularized form of humanistic progress is regarded as the end in itself. Superior to non-human animals, the task of the human, so the assumption suggests, it to control the environment by way of dominating it. In his recent book Straw Dogs, John Gray writes aptly: “To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given [to] us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals” (Gray, 2002, p. 4). This is the fundamental error. When a march of progress is founded in something deficient, malaise and failure are inevitable. The temptation to think that we need only “catch up” with scientific progression is a mistake confirmed by the fact that science opens itself up to decline. In the 1970s, Theodore Roszak, a leading critic of scientific rationalism, wrote: “We conquer nature, we augment our power and wealth...but the despair burrows in deeper and grows fatter; it feeds on our secret sense of having failed the potentialities of human being” (Roszak, 1972, p. xxxi). The impetus behind Roszak’s attack was the claim that because of not being able to attain scientific objectivity, psychological objectivity, the impression of impersonality and autonomy, served as the consoling surrogate. Through objectifying nature, humanity became alienated by nature for the sake of exercising “objective” power over it. Such a stance produces a calculating, and calculated, psychology that fails to comprehend the damage done to nature in the course of attaining progress. Whereas some strands of environmentalism suggest a Rousseauan return to nature, Roszak’s response was to become heedful to the implications that an instrumentalist approach toward the environment would have. The worth of science, in the words of Bennett, is that “it had achieved its extraordinary ‘success’ through the application of a rigorously narrow focus which simply screened out anything beyond its immediate frame of reference” (Bennett, 2001, p. 109). That science is the beacon of progress is a claim founded in the idea that it fulfills the practical application of reason. The impacts that science has vis-

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à-vis cultural pessimism are, however, slim. Domesticating nature and bringing order to chaos creates the impression of growth and control, yet the impression is only tenable from an anthropocentric perspective. About the possible outcome of this anthropocentrism, John Gray speculates: “Science has been used to support the conceit that humans are unlike all other animals in their ability to understand the world. In fact, its supreme value may be in showing that the world humans are programmed to perceive is a chimera” (Gray, 2002, p. 24). That the world and humanity are “accidental” entities rewards the scientist with a vocation that relies on the idea of disillusioned freedom. For scientific rationalism, the task of science must be realized, if only to liberate humanity from its animalistic counterparts and superstitious delusions. The eventual consequence of scientific rationalism is an estrangement from nature. With nature viewed as a mechanistic process, devoid of anything overtly transcendental, it becomes reduced to mere matter. Before the discovery of DNA, Richard Dawkins says, “it was still possible to believe that there was something fundamentally and irreducibly mysterious in living protoplasm. No longer. Even those philosophers who had been disposed to a mechanistic view of life would not have dared for such total fulfillment of their wildest dreams” (Dawkins, 1996, p. 17). As a rational scientist, Dawkins is being affirmative. Because of this loss of ineffability, however, progress takes the place of meaning insofar as meaning is now measurable in terms of data gathered.

IV We have seen how cultural pessimism intensifies as decline becomes more evident. Principally, we have examined this evidence in terms of a conflict between human beings and nature, though the full extent of cultural pessimism exceeds this category. Cultural pessimism consistently holds out for an alleged future which supposes that rational progress can replace theological providence. As a result, science strives toward a false autonomy. This drive toward a world explained in terms of mechanical attributes harvests nostalgia for an arrested form of history (in the shape of preserving the environment) and a renewed faith in science (in the shape of rationalistic progress). Pierre Boulez writes: “A civilization which tends to conserve is a civilization in decline” (Boulez, 1976, p. 33). Hence, progress is a double bind. Firstly, we see the desire to preserve what has been eroded by science in the name of humanity, and secondly, science is trusted to advance new forms of technology that can restore its own errors while establishing a future where those errors become void. In both cases, faith in reason is foremost.

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Respite from the double bind of destruction and delusion cannot occur until the march of progress is redirected. Reason has sought to subdue the disquiet we feel in terms of a world that no longer aligns with fixed values. Thus, a wait for future restoration occurs. “It is a strange fancy,” writes Gray, “to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can do is give another twist to the normal madness” (Gray, 2002, p. 28). Things crack, fracture, and then give way. At the same time, we cling to hope with renewed confidence. Cultural pessimism thrives because it is a resistance against the incompatibility between expectation and experience. The resistance, as we will now see, presents itself in terms of materializing memory and moreover opposing the presence of decay.

V So far, we have had to contend with a perspective on the ruin which regards it as destructive or as an object of utilitarian worth, to be resorted to for the sake of either profit or historic significance. We contest such a view and instead advocate an ethics of critical memory and reclamation in place of an ethics of remembrance and preservation. The age in which prosperity looms under fortuitous circumstances is over. Events no longer harness the pathway of history. Instead, the construction of the pathway acts as the determining force. In our conservative stance on this pathway, permanency has been regarded as the highest virtue. Both reason and humanism have sought to realize themselves in this permanency. From the viewpoint of the present work, decline is not something to be resisted. If progress gives rise to movement, rather than an inertia which adopts the appearance of being progressive, an inversion of the rationalistic idea of progress is a logical conclusion. The idea that values are engineered to endure throughout time is a misconception that renders specific modes of thought obsolete and abject. Accordingly, permanency is not to be valued outright, but impermanency, discontinuity, and dissolution. Our relationship to progress and reason warrants reappraisal, as does our relationship to memory and forgetfulness. Since it is at the center of our study, the modern ruin will provide the medium through which notions of memory and progress are played out. Indeed, it is with the modern ruin that the idea of progress and memory comes into a synthesis. Clarifying how progress is regarded in the present, we make recourse to how ruins relate to memories. In turn, we aspire to contest the monumental past. In the words of Nietzsche, “There are no more living mythologies, you say? Religions are at their last grasp? Look at the religion of

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the power of history, and the priests of the mythology of Ideas, with their scarred knees!” (Nietzsche, 1992, p. 83) As we have seen, the desire toward preservation derives from an impetus to create an enforced continuity between different generations. This desire is intensified in an age determined by decline, since temporal continuity appears vulnerable. The materialization of memory becomes endemic, even to the point where those original objects of preservation are no longer preserved for their individual purpose, but for the sake of custom and nostalgia. Since buildings are the most durable spatial objects, the built environment becomes the medium by which preservation is pronounced. David Lowenthal writes: Amidst bewildering novelty, historic sites and antique objects spell security, ancient bricks and mortar offer tangible assurances of stability. From photo-enshrined mantels and antiques-laden parlors to conserved Pompeii and restored Williamsburg, preservation provides havens imbued with the peace or the thrill, the majesty or the intimacy, of some past (Lowenthal, 1985, p. 389).

This idea that “some past,” even if it is an essentially misconstrued representation, must be restored forges a distinct approach to architecture that is dependent upon the degree to which that building is decayed. Monuments, as we have seen, form a central icon of time, place, and history. With the monument, absence is preserved as a fixed presence, which usually sanitizes the history of destruction. Marc Augé writes: Now, official memory needs monuments; it beautifies death and horror. The beautiful cemeteries of Normandy…align their tombs all along the intertwined pathways. Nobody could say that this arranged beauty is not moving, but the emotion it arouses is born from the harmony of forms, from the impressive spectacle of the army of the dead immobilized in the white crosses standing at attention (Augé, 2004, p. 88).

The politics of memory, which encourages an image of the past as rational, depends on the wreckage of destruction. War memorials, if not passed over or through, obey conventional rules of the ordering of memory as if, in the words of Benjamin, able to tell, “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 265). The return to the memory of destruction through the monument creates a mythologized image of history which is unreceptive to subjective engagement. Because of this exclusivity, memory is not created, but preserved. Instead of maintaining the continuity of the past, submissive allegiance to the past domesticates it. With events of destruction, the subordination of history to domestic order risks losing the event to a chain of homogenous historical events. For this reason, a generation of artists confronting the memory of Auschwitz is becoming increasingly bold in their

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opposition to a static representation of history. Against the closed and excluding impression of temporal events as over, these artists want to render history dynamic, so preventing Auschwitz from falling into oblivion. The aggressive re-positioning of the past, as evident in Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s Harburg Anti-Fascist Memorial, an “anti-monument” designed to vanish beneath the surface over a number of years, disallows an aesthetic mythologizing of the Holocaust. What remains in this disappearance is not an uninterrupted space, but the memory of a disruption framed by the absent monument. For James E. Young, Its aim was not to console but to provoke, not to remain fixed but to change, not to be everlasting but to disappear, not to be ignored by its passerby but to demand interaction, not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification, not to accept graciously the burden of memory but to throw it back at the town’s feet (Young, 2000, p. 131).

Because the Gerz’s monument invites the future of its absence, history gains depth and meaning by force of the imagination. The absence of consolation, spatially and temporally, means that history is not content. So long as spatial and temporal contingency are deferred, then a new kind of erosion occurs—an erosion of meaning and depth which reiterates the fact that preservation is misleading, deifying, as it does, the very thing it seeks to deny: the impermanent. The stagnation with which the monument is presented implicates an unwelcome kitschness, in that historic depth gives way to surface appraisal. Temporal depth and historic meaning only occur when an object accords with its original form. A reproduction is a pastiche of what originally existed. The monument exemplifies this imitative aesthetics by claiming to be autonomous from the context outside of itself. Ironically, as a result of preserving monuments for the sake of nostalgia and history, the aspiration toward temporal continuity is undermined by the monument acting as a symbol of segregation, Lowenthal writes: “The very effort of salvage is self-conscious and crisis-started. And it encumbers the landscape with artifacts which no longer attest a living antiquity but celebrate what is dead” (Ibid., p. 392). The monument is instrumental in divorcing the present from the past, because it is a backward-looking object. Were monuments neglected, the nostalgic quality would disappear. Such a nostalgic sensibility differentiates the modern ruin from the monument. A derelict factory or an abandoned asylum does not hark back to a golden age. In the ruin, space and time coincide. Undoubtedly, many of those ancient ruins have become monumental. This is because time has been willfully suspended in their presence. Factually, the ancient ruin ought to have dissolved. In the place of

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neglect, the ruin is in a process of constant becoming-toward. It moves. The worst thing that might happen is for ruins to be suddenly “appreciated,” and so detained by the hands of restorers who, overlooking the fact that they resonate the absence of reason, proceed to seize them as museum pieces. With ancient ruins, the prohibited zones and guarded entrances mean that monumentality outweighs the origin of the ruin so that rational continuity can be maintained. The memory of what might have existed in the granite and stone has been erased by a plasticity denoted by the inertia that renders depth vacuous. To suggest, however, that modern ruins do not invite nostalgia would be overstated. While the process of decline is toward an undefined future, during the moment of collapse, the reflective tendency to recollect what materialized before the point of dissolution is inevitable. Considering what occurred prior to ruination exercises the imagination and provides aesthetic pleasure insofar as reconstruction and unity fulfill a Kantian model of formal beauty. The past of the ruin, however, differs from the past of spatial order, domesticity, and regularity. Because the ruin has ceased operation, it does not follow that temporality has also ceased. This is clear if we contrast ruined place with Bachelard’s account of domestic place. Domestic memory, as Bachelard has taught, relies on the consistency of spatial archetypes. With this continuity, dwelling is gained as temporality becomes assured. As memory fragments temporally, place strives to retain it. In this way, memories become “motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 9). Bachelard’s opposition between temporal and spatial accounts of memory implicates a division between external (biographical) and internal (hermeneutic) narratives of memory. The evaluative connotations of this division are clear: “localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates” (Ibid., p.9). Since memory and time are compressed in place, “topoanalysis” emerges as the concrete method by which memory is “localized” while intimate place is shown to be elemental in the construction of the self. Central to Bachelard’s working of topoanalysis is a flight into the past which is as heedful to actual events as it is to the “stage setting” which contextualizes those events. What sets the stage for events is intimate place. Penetrating memory requires a rigorous analysis of past places, since memory discloses itself in the nuances of place. Bachelard explains how, “the topoanalyst starts to ask questions: Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence?” (Ibid.). The apparent insignificance of such questions is disproved by their ultimate vast-

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ness. In structuring the topoanalytic investigation around the incidental, Bachelard avoids a homogenous account of the home, determined by geometry and abstraction. Instead, he places the account in the midst of lived place. As a result of this, topoanalysis reconstructs not only the descriptive content of a phenomenological investigation, but also the very features which define that content. Remembering place, it is invariably the most banal features that convey the greatest potency, so come back to haunt us. This interplay between memory and experience reminds us that mythically, topoanalysis was born of a desire to situate space and place within the mind. That the desire was invoked by suffering, loss and physical ruin is no coincidence. According to Frances A. Yates, the poet Simonides of Ceos was giving a public eulogy in a banqueting hall. Once the eulogy had finished, Simonides was instructed to collect payment from outside of the hall. While he was doing so, the roof of the banqueting hall fell in, killing the guests inside the hall. Because the victims were horrendously disfigured by the ruin, their relatives were unable to recognize them. Simonides, however, was able to remember where they had been placed, and so could establish who the relatives were by dint of memory (Yates, 1966, p. 17). Thereafter, the “art of memory” was conceived. By enforcing a spatial image upon the mind, recollection is aided by a definite and embodied narrative. Central to the theory is the claim that sight is the most vivid of all the senses. Following place mentally meant being able to recollect what was remembered in individual architectural aspects. By seeing places mentally, memory itself was able to be situated spatially. Yet arranging the contents of the mind into spatial forms is more than mere memoria technica. By locating space within the mind, we preserve an atemporal image of that space, which refuses to yield itself towards spatial and temporal decay. Hence, Simonides was able to return to a place now ruined by enforcing the previous image of that place onto the present one. At the same time, how the hall was in the present was not suppressed by the former image. Past and present converged. The ruin could be reconstructed with recourse to the past, despite the physical destruction persisting. The physical inscription of place, which Bachelard mentions, is foretold in the myth of Simonides, whereby memory of the spatial past is elemental in the construction of the temporal present. Just as the mythical account of Simonides reminds us of how the emplacement of space and place upon the mind can reconstruct the past, so Bachelard’s topoanalysis is framed by an account of embodied memory which appears to evade temporal entropy. Of course, the temporal distance between Simonides leaving and returning to the hall was, we are told, brief. The opportunity for memory to become fragmented

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lessened. Returning to familiar place becomes complicated when that distance is broadened. Remembering place is one way in which it is preserved. With this act of preservation, the mind binds itself with the place of memory. For Bachelard, this renders the home “psychology complex,” such is the intimate value vested in it. A home becomes psychology complex through lived experience. The attachment to the home is seldom contrived. Instead, the bond is enforced through its containing a past, of its own and of those who inhabit it. Encountering place intimately means leaving a part of oneself within that place. Indeed, the more we experience a place, the more attached we become to it, negatively or otherwise. Reproaching a specific place for the memory it invokes reveals only an attachment we had to that place in the first instance, the assumption being that memory roots itself in the resistance that place encounters against destruction and decay. As the mutable threatens to dislodge the home from its surroundings, the attachment between memory and place is reinforced. When a place is destroyed, grieving often takes on the form of recollecting that place. We remember places of intimacy, public and private, just as we would remember those who died in those places. The recollection is more than mere sentiment. Instead, reconstruction of lost places also restores the myth that space and place permit permanency. Yi-Fu Tuan has written, “place is permanent and hence reassuring to man, who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere” (Tuan, 2003, p. 54). In the ruin, Bachelard’s domestic continuity is disrupted. The “stage setting” for the past to be invoked falls into obscurity. Whereas Simonides of Ceos was able to rediscover the spatial center after the ruin, such an alignment between time and place is only possible in temporal abstraction. The art of memory falters in the ruin, because place and temporal continuity are discontinuous. Unlike the demand domestic place makes upon subjectivity to recollect what has since been destroyed in time, the ruin is not determined by what is absent to complete it. Unlike the enforcement of a political agenda through the conservation of the monument, the ruin frees us from an already formed definition of history. The history of memory in the ruin, though informed by factual circumstances, embarks on a spontaneous journey as the process of decline begins. The false arrangement of the past, whereby the surplus remains are discarded, presenting history as an ordered, selfcontained, and rationalistic project, is overruled by the emergence of the past in the ruin, as fragmented and incomplete. The ruin is not selective in its remembrance. A claim to unity, which domestic place and monuments make, is always informed by an impartial and selective perspective. In Benjamin’s reading of history, “whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day

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in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 258). The violent history of history gains equality in the ruin. Fixed meaning, determined by the constructers of memory, themselves the spokespeople of a political agenda, is delivered of its determinacy. The plaques and concealed spaces which instruct us how to regard “official” memory and history, abundant in the corridors of museums, offer no benefit to the ruins. Curators, who reconfigure history in terms of its aesthetic merits, contribute to the creation of still life, themselves included. The ruin undoes this calm. Forcing memory to be ambiguous, history refuses to open itself up to abstraction. The ruin’s memory no longer belongs to anyone. Because of this, memory becomes indeterminate, and thus non-linear. The ruin does not bring us back to a definite temporal point. Instead, it suggests a limitless potential of temporal points. Despite being placed in site, the relationship between geometry and place cannot be depended on for temporal continuity. The return to the ruin affirms its discontinuous nature. The ruin forgets those moments, simultaneously forging new ones as the structure vanishes. Thus, the ruin maintains its flux and vitality to the very end. The ruin also dislocates sensory categories. We find allusions which confuse the senses, enforcing the impression of a presence that can be grasped. We tread carefully, so as not to encroach upon what might have existed there in the past. At the same time, the mind cannot resist feeling melancholy in realizing that all activity results in irrevocable collapse. The complicated unfolding of wallpaper when it no longer adheres to its original surface, wavering fibers unhinged from the ceiling, now exposed to the ground beneath, and doorways which are no longer shut by default but rather hang in a state of constant becoming, testify to a place in which deterioration reminds us that beneath the static veneer of everyday life, the unremitting toil of absolute vanity resides. Monuments suggest nothing of this reclamation of memory. Instead, the memory that is presented is plastic and contrived. John Piper writes: “A building in which decay has been arrested smells, however faintly, of the museum; and in a few years it has the dated look of somebody or something that has outlived its time” (Piper, 1948, p. 91).With the monument, the revision of history is justified for a number of reasons other than heritage, economy, and civic pride. Monuments are singular, their erosion affirmative in terms of the creation of lived memory. With an entire city, however, the ethics of memory warrants reconsideration, since the relationship between place and memory is more complex. The destruction of Warsaw’s Old Town and its subsequent physical reconstruction after the Second World War is a testament to the ethical complexity sur-

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rounding restoration. The aesthetics of destruction, which this book has only mentioned in passing, distinguishes itself from an aesthetic consideration of decay by implicating an ethical aspect which determines aesthetic judgment. Aestheticism and the ruins of war are an uncomfortable, if contrived, combination. Yet the preservation of the memory of destruction outweighs the demand aesthetics makes on rationality. In formal terms, destroyed ruins and decayed ruins are separate. When destruction undermines a city, decay occurs as that city undergoes neglect. After time, decay and destruction appear to merge, despite the initial reason that brought about the downfall. The mergence is misleading, however, in that temporal entropy is the law of ruin while violence is the law of destruction. For this reason, the distinction between the ethical imperative to remember destruction and the ethical imperative to free history from a static representation needs to be made. When Warsaw’s Old Town was razed by the Germans, its reconstruction was a given. Warsaw’s conservation chief during the time explains: “It was our duty to resuscitate it. We did not want a new city...We wanted the Warsaw of our day and that of the future to continue the ancient tradition” (cited in Lowenthal, 1985, p. 46). The desire to rebuild the old Warsaw was a success. The reconstruction of the Royal Castle was completed in 1971, despite it appearing to be hundreds of years old, details included. In the paintwork, deliberate faintness is manufactured. The Castle appears battered by time. Picturesque decay abounds, despite the Castle being structurally pristine. Yet were the city left as a monument to historical destruction, restoration would be absurd. Instead, the restoration of Warsaw’s Old Town is a monument not to a specific event, but to a spirit of defiance. As a result, the Old Town adopts the presence of a stalled, retrogressive stage piece in which the organic aspect has been removed. The Old Town is kitsch, in the sense of being a tourist attraction, temporally manipulated to enter a timeless state. It is a testament to the restorers that they managed to reconstruct the city in such detail, so much so that “even the elders do no realize in their everyday life that this town, which appears old, is to a great extent new. And they do not feel it to be an artificial creation” (Ibid., p. 290) While we might sympathize with the motivation to restore what was damaged and destroyed in the midst of war, the reconfiguration of place and time is a danger which encourages a revisionist approach to history. The hollowness we experience in places that aspire toward a certain image, even though gravity suggests otherwise, confirms the fact that restoration is fundamentally incompatible with the organic process of temporal entropy. The detrimental effect that the application of artifice onto a destroyed object has is repeated in the act of converting industrial architecture for domes-

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tic use. If judged to have features worth saving, an attempt will be made to “market” a redevelopment of a site that places onus on period features. One writer from SAVE Britain’s Heritage explains: “Those who have had the imagination and conviction to see the potential of decaying industrial buildings have been handsomely rewarded by profit as well as by accolade” (Binney, 1990, p. 13). A converted dock has the appeal of presenting the illusion of temporal continuity, whereas the temporal depth is autonomous from any original continuity. It is an illusion to think that we are buying into a part of the heritage trail. What we are buying into is the myth of permanency. Aesthetically, the consequence of this spatial conversion is absolute and irreversible. If not rendered sterile living environments, then commercial profit takes hold in the form of faceless cafes, restaurants, and shopping arcades. Legitimizing ruins by putting them to use means destroying the ruin and creating a mimic. For the ruin-maker, a manipulation of their character is enforced until the ruin is either usable in a social context or justified as contesting “plasticity.” In the worst examples, commoditized ruins, delimited and guarded, are presented as an alternative to clean space. Thereafter, the ruin becomes a novelty as an object that startles us but simultaneously maintains a distance by having a legitimate purpose. Private companies deem fit to inhabit converted ruins, since it creates the impression of maintaining a stake in a locality. Dean Clough Mills in Halifax, England is an example of how a place can be destroyed when converted for commercial use. Where space was once emptied out, generic shops now inhabit dead areas of confinement. Any intimacy the place may have had with the past is obliterated as consumerism and fashion unfold. Aesthetic displeasure with converted ruins is bound with ontological deceit. The ontology of progress demonstrates the supremacy of decline. By understanding its significance, the truth of movement becomes vital. With converted ruins, movement is seized. In the place of movement, a lifedenying imperative materializes. The relationship between aesthetics and ontology is clear. In its inverted formula, the relationship can be seen from the perspective of restorers and traditionalists, whereby a miscalculation between decay and temporal cessation is constructed. Because of this erroneous relation, failure is conjoined with weakness, and weakness conjoined with antiprogress. The denial of the ontology of decline enforces the bond between death and decay. One of the upshots of preservation, conservation, and restoration is the belief that the absence of being can be suspended so long as we remain watchful of erosion. When we can view it from afar, a memento mori is pleasurable, but when it encroaches on notions of use and purpose, it be-

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comes a source of discomfort. We do not like to be reminded of our finitude. When buildings proceed to graphically depict a slow demise, the process will either be halted or demolished. That we have to resist such a process, or stop it before it expires of its own accord, emphasizes that the process is prior to the conversion and consequently will outlive any such attempt to undermine it. We feel pleasure in witnessing a staged demolition, because we have taken control of the process. By annihilating the derelict before it dissolves naturally, we demonstrate our immortality by way of explosives. The abrupt cheer heard as the remote charge is pushed is not because the audience is thinking of a prosperous future in which new developments can supplant the former ruin, but because decay has been denied and progress has been attainted. Progress and destruction, after all, have a solid history together.

VI We began this study with the aim of discovering the Nothing. The Nothing is the dynamic between decline and silence. It is the temporal moment in which the presence of violence withdraws, leaving its trace to resound. In the ruin, this dynamic was articulated. Aesthetically, the Nothing is indistinguishable from the essence of the ruin. Historically, the Nothing arises in an age in which a determining influence from the past, still detectable in the present, withdraws. The temporal dynamism of the Nothing, inherent in its structure, is played out in the ruin. We are at home in the ruin because the ruin places the Nothing at the center of things. Our engagement with the ruin is stipulated on the fact that it acts a reciprocal mirror corresponding ontological time and subjective consciousness. The more we acknowledge this correspondence, the more we will realize that as the ruin contains the Nothing, we embody it. Because rational progress tends toward a fixed image of history, time, and place, an impartial concentration of the solidity of memory occurs. With the past acting as the determining agent, the refusal to grant memory deliverance becomes imperative. Instead, hoarding, nostalgia, and preservation conspire in the construction of an outmoded thought. The inequality between memory and oblivion does not limit itself to a sanctimonious regard for the absolute and ordered, but sifts into the everyday encounter with subjective history and time. Yet the proliferation of excessive memory leads to a state in which the distinction between what is present and what is absent, what is significant and what is insignificant, is blurred. If, as Nietzsche taught, everything has the potential to be monumentalized, then everything is tantamount

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to the same value, and so to the same temporal status (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 74). We have seen how the emplacement of memory loses its fixed status in the ruin. The ruin suggests a disordering of the supposed “motionlessness” of memory. Against domestic and political memory, memory in the ruin is nomadic, dynamic, and fragmented. So far, we have concentrated on memory as a presence. Our task now is to apply this dynamism to the dialectic between memory and forgetting. Throughout this book, we have been concerned with the burden of the past. The burden has appeared in terms of a remembered unity which persists in the present, but also as an imposition which lends itself toward impenetrable nostalgia. In our celebration of decay, we have discovered a reworking of memory and progress. The view of memory as a burden is not unconditional. Personal identity, even when disrupted and nonlinear, relies on the worth of remembrance. Indeed, a formal consideration of aesthetic experience involves an interplay between recollection and imagination, both of which endeavor to create a unified if rational image. Excluding the ethical imperative to remember, which, as we have already remarked, is peculiar to the history of destruction, rational memory mirrors the totalizing yet selective account of history in which fragments are discarded. Because of this assault on memory, as the past decays, memory is converted and reworked to maintain temporal continuity. Both monuments and converted ruins attest to this revision and false stability. Since decline is ontologically prior to continuity, the conversion of memory warrants criticism. Instead of an ethical demand toward continuity, let us place memories in ruin. The struggle between memory and forgetfulness is not antithetical, as Marc Augé writes: “To praise oblivion is not to revile memory; even less is it to neglect remembrance, but rather to recognize the work of oblivion in the first one and to spot it in the second” (Augé, 2004, p. 14). For Augé, the identity of memory and oblivion depend on one another, as do life and death. Life gains its identity by the negating finitude of death. With this dialectic in mind, Augé is able to establish the intimacy of oblivion within memory. Forgetfulness emerges as the loss of remembrance, not the loss of the event. The event, suggests Augé, relies on a loss of remembrance for it to attain “natural continuation” (Ibid., p. 17). The loss of remembrance suggests an ethics of memory in which we keep vigilance over the rise and fall of historical objects. With recourse to a botanical analogy, Augé explains: Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower. Those plants that achieve their destiny, those flourishing plaints have in some way forgotten themselves in order to

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transform: between the seeds or the cuttings from which they were born and what they have become there is hardly any apparent relationship anymore (Ibid.)

This rich and beautiful passage resounds with significance. The attachment between decline and progress is affirmed in that a concession to willed absence enables history to be released from its previous bonds. Forgetting the past which has already flourished means that transformation is possible. Now, new history becomes possible as the “apparent relationship” between temporal moments becomes autonomous. Personal identity, which once relied on a single thread grounded by memory, suffers under this tribunal. Instead, identity is reworked so that discontinuity becomes tenable. Not being the same as we remember ourselves to be establishes a measure of experience and thus progress. Without the sacrifice of historical familiarity, memory deceives by drawing the distant past into the undetermined present, so altering temporal boundaries. Augé: “A bad memory is a smoke-screen that glues us to the present and removes that which is too close to give the illusion of perspective” (Ibid., p. 19). The selectivity of memory coincides with its continued conversion. The culling and suppression of new experience for the sake of enabling old memory to endure means that static and morbid nostalgia prospers. Augé’s analysis of oblivion reveals a subtle interaction between erosion and presence which recalls Nietzsche’s consideration of history as “active forgetfulness” (Nietzsche, 1996). Such forgetfulness is not absolute, since a disservice is committed to history if memory and oblivion become categories of devotion. “Happy” and “unhappy” memory alters in time. What was once a burden, in the hands of temporal distance, becomes an object of nostalgia. Even the experience of troubled memory opens itself up to being remembered appreciatively. The memory of how we remembered things often resonates in a power which outshines the original memory. As David Gross suggests, the elimination of unhappy memory is insufficient, since in the Nietzschean conversion from unhappy to happy memory, rich satisfaction is experienced: “The highest forms of happiness may well come about when one willingly enters the “nocturnal pit” (Hegel) of the past and then transforms the negative that one finds there into something positive” (Gross, 2000, p. 71). The onerous aspect of memory, its insidious influence (rationality) and melancholy (nostalgia), is relieved, albeit precariously, as the past becomes an object to be carved, if through creative destruction, anew. In the thread of temporality, a critical approach to memory suggests itself which enables the static sediment of the past to be disentangled from what needs to be recalled to the present. Disentangling the past means disrupting it. In Chapters Three and Four of this book, we have seen how the disruption

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of the past leads consciousness to recognize its temporal disparity and continued displacement. At stake in the homeless aporia was a claim to unity. Consciousness sought to catch up with itself. In doing so, the origin of memory was lost and the temporal present fell into disrepair. Thereafter, the flight into nostalgia took hold. Nostalgia, paradoxically, forgets the past by imbuing memory with a mythical lineage which maintains its constant temporality. For the nostalgic, the past is already at hand by its conversion to the present. For this reason, nostalgic memory is necessarily untimely and uncanny. Nostalgia corresponds with the past, but only insofar as it replicates the past and forgets it. For Nietzsche, [The] vision of lost paradise…must be disturbed; all too soon it will be called out of its state of forgetfulness. Then it will learn to understand the phrase ‘it was’: that password which gives conflict, suffering and satiety across to man so as to remind what his existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one (Nietzsche, 1996, p. 61).

The phrase “it was” aligns with the phrase “it is no longer.” Both phrases persist in time, yet fail to summon the end of nostalgia. The “no longer” only distinguishes the indelible trace left. Recognition of memory threatens to overpower if not “actively forgotten.” “If he is to live,” writes Nietzsche, “man must possess and from time to time employ the strength to break up and dissolve a part of the past: he does this by bringing it before the tribunal, scrupulously examining it and finally condemning it” (Ibid., pp. 75–76). In the music of Giya Kancheli, we discover a language of aesthetics, prefigured in the ruin, which testifies to the presence of the past, yet simultaneously proceeds to disrupt it. In this way, we hear an ethics of memory actively forgetting. Let us hear Kancheli’s “Abii ne Viderem” (1992–94). The translation of this piece of music is “I turned away so as not to see.” Kancheli composed the work against the backdrop of civil war in Georgia during the early 1990s, at which time he was already in exile. Turning away so as not to see the past means bearing witness to the past by negation. Kancheli’s stance of defiance acknowledges the traces of time rather than denying it. Throughout “Abii ne Viderem,” a struggle between history, recollection, and disruption ensues. Kancheli’s language of dynamic stasis means that this struggle develops violently. Restraint and attack coincide. The past is emplaced and motifs are obsessively repeated, before being irrationally withdrawn. The lack of musical logic in Kancheli’s music is startling because our expectation of temporal narration clashes with our experience of it. For musicologist Sally Macarthur,

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The loud, bustling, fast and furious passages surrounding the feeble, soft notes of the viola seem to swallow it up, yet because the whole of this opening section of the work is enveloped and punctuated by a radiant silence…the bleak, despairing, raging, loud, fast and furious music is rescued and transformed by it (Macarthur, 2005,p. 9).

Toward the end of “Abii ne Viderem,” the pace, already slow, descends into near inertia. In that moment of ceaseless time, a direct confrontation with the past is brought about through the conventions of melody. The confrontation is terse. Like the fragments of familiarity which exist in the ruin, our consolation vanishes as musical centrality gives way to volatility and discontinuity. In that discontinuity, we discover the silence of memory, now ruined. The employment of broken tonality in Kancheli’s music means that a temporal context can be created which is then allowed to alter. Yet the altering of time does not entail a conversion. Memory in Kancheli’s music never assumes the semblance of definite direction nor progress. The composer has written how, “there are no ideals like struggle, equality or a ‘fine future’ there to exercise an appeal. On the other hand, traces of grief caused by the imperfections of the world, even disregarding the most horrific examples of human history, can undoubtedly be discovered” (Kancheli, 2005, p. 18). When Kancheli was invited to compose a site-specific piece of music for the deserted village of Imber, England in 2003, he was struck by the Deceptive sense of calmness that takes on a rather mystical nature in these kinds of places. When you realize where you really are, you can’t help imagining what might interrupt this silence. If I were to compare it to a similar place in Georgia that I know very well, (David Gareji—fortunately no longer used as a training ground), the atmosphere in Imber, in the absence of the Army, seemed rather idyllic (Kancheli, 2003).

The violent history of the village, as a training ground and as a site of displacement, meant that the temporal aspect of Kancheli’s music aligned with its outward form. The empty landscape of Imber, its battered ruins colonized by the American army, became a gathering ground for temporal disparities, none of which were unequivocal. Thus, at Imber, Georgia’s Rustavi Choir paraded the empty streets, emphasizing the incongruity between temporal and spatial planes, yet simultaneously underscoring the structural consistency of disrupted memory. In the place of the ruinous disparity, we gain a glimpse of memory coming undone by being inserted into the temporal present without the burden of a mythical lineage. Kancheli’s genius is that he intercedes between memory and history, drawing upon the patina of the past and decontextualizing it in the present.

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The lodged familiarity of memory loses its normative status. Instead, the “it is no longer” fuses with a tense resolution. The particles of memory, now jolted by violence, fall unevenly. With the logic of melodic narration undermined, recollection of history evades the imposition of false categories.

VII From listening to Kancheli, let us now turn to the ruin, where critical memory finds its spatial counterpart. Let us place ourselves in a derelict mental asylum (Fig. 16). A tall rusted fence, laced with barbed wire and adorned with signs portending to danger, guards a dilapidated asylum. From the outside of the fence, a sprawling network of ruined hallways, broken glass, and boarded-up windows hovers in the distance. Stark trees collude with discarded remains. An entire history is alluded to before burying itself in obscurity. A sign which reads “recreation field” no longer pertains to its origin. Instead, the echo of the past has been consumed by the eroding present. The only way in is through a nook in the fence and then through dense flora and occasional fauna. Thereafter, entrance is made through the burnt door. Floors thick with liquid soften beneath the feet, their planks disclosed through erosion. Walls, already fissured to reveal the thread beneath, respond to tactility by disbanding completely. In the absence of fragility, such as we encounter outside of derelict place, sensitivity is dulled through expectation. The sensation is initially of trepidation. Everywhere we find the encroachment of wildlife, the inversion of humanity’s superiority over nature slowly being reversed. For all this, the absence is vehemently charged with the presence of past events. It is a dangerous place, not only in the structural sense—with each step taken the floor literally gives way, plunging you into a moist void—but also in the sense that it alludes to an impossible past that is tactile while simultaneously utterly remote. Things roam. Yet their presence is only ever hinted at. The old dentist’s chair is still reclined in an inviting manner. A syringe rolls across the hallway leading to a defunct wheelchair, its brown leather torn and weathered. Returning to the hallways, we find their endlessness exaggerated by the absence of company. Sometimes a change in the color of wallpaper can dictate an undiscovered area. Regal red indicates the presence of the still-intact chapel; the sterile blue prefigures the presence of the kitchen. At other times, things merge, and the point at which you think you are lost turns out to be the point at which you began.

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Figure 16: North Wales Asylum. Image by author.

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The ruin is the place of becoming, the place of truth, the place in which reason is absent and the Nothing is present. Through being overlooked, the ruin has been reclaimed, and thus rendered open to the indeterminate. Things are falling, adopting new forms that unite the synthetic and the natural. The doors and floors are caving in; the structure itself is becoming increasingly destitute with each glance. Memories no longer stand as beacons of defined points. They are present, but simultaneously dissolving. In the ruin, there is never a moment in which you feel alone. Always some glance is just out of view. From the exterior, where coldness and austerity define the ruin as a “dangerous site,” the thought of feeling intimate toward the ruin is remote. On the inside, however, a dialogue unfurls between those who have passed through the place and left their indelible mark in the process and those who are presently experiencing that passing. It is a private dialogue, reinforced by the ruin being physically enclosed. The question of a fixed division between inside and outside is illusory. Even when we encounter an expanse where nature outnumbers discarded hospital beds, so enforcing the assurance that this is a “natural” ruin, and thus justified as being part of the heritage trial, the reassurance soon collapses when we realize that it is only a hallway where the roof has been destroyed. You are still inside. It is not that you have made it outside but that the outside has made its way in.

VIII The future of the ruin can only be spoken of in terms of it actively disintegrating. The decline of the ruin occurs when the ruin becomes an artifact. Ruins might well be thought of as living organisms embodying notions of progress, forgetfulness, and reclamation. We too must learn to forget the ruins themselves, not undermining their memory by striving to immortalize them as museum pieces of a given age but delighting in the possibility of the memory becoming indeterminate, and thus endless. In a culture that has dispensed with the idea of reason providing the pathway to a golden future, stipulated upon the resurrection of an equally golden past, no space remains for prolonged nostalgia. Nostalgia pre-supposes something that is fundamentally incompatible with the ontology of decline: namely, that there can be a homecoming whereof the home is absent. At the same time, the absence of reason does not entail irrationality or finality. The drive is not toward disorder or disaster. In the ruin, spatially and ontologically, all that will cease to exist is the drive toward permanency, rational progress, and static remembrance. Since these three notions are predicated on the idea that history is pushing toward an absolute goal, they are

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manifestly incompatible with a world that claims to move. Constant becoming-toward precludes finality and instead posits flux as its essence. Nonetheless, the absence of reason will entail a division from the present mode of thinking. The degree to which we adhere to notions of the absolute, the permanent, and the ascendery are suggestive of an engrained reliance on reason. To what extent this thinking will continue to endure and for how long is a matter of conjecture. That it will dissolve is certain. Speculating on the closure of a manner of thinking does not necessarily entail an extinction of the thinking subject. However, the passing of generations may be required before specific inclinations have vanished entirely. It is a future in which erosion, decay, and ruins will be valued in and of themselves. This succumbing to dissolution can only be envisaged speculatively from the present perspective, for it is a future that we may never see for ourselves.

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Index Adorno, Theodore, 68–69, 73, 81–84, 190 aesthetic experience, xxv, 13, 16–18, 136, 142–143, 177–178, 184–185, 189, 243 Alberti, Leon Battista, 158 alchemy, 45, 166 alleyway, xviii, 156–159, 162, 189, 203 apartment stoop, 159–167, 172, 203 Arendt, Hannah, 58–59 Aristotle, 5–6, 86 Aufklärung, 79 Augé, Marc, 244; on childhood memories, 55; on memory, 234; on non-places, 187; on oblivion, 243 Auschwitz, Poland, 68, 75, 234 Bachelard, Gaston, 43, 55–57, 127–128, 155, 160–165, 169, 200, 210, 236– 238; on dwelling, 160, 200–201; on inside and outside, 162; on memory, 43, 160; on the rationalizing of space, 127 Barr, John, 120–121, 137 Barrés, Maurice, 110 Bastille, Storming of, 80 Bataille, Georges, 158; and taboo, 170, 189–191 Baudelaire, Charles, 210; and decadence, 110; and decay, 111; on aesthetic experience, 16 Baudrillard, Jean, 67, 74–76, 101, 116, 193, 251 beauty, 150 Becker, Carl, 228 Beckett, Samuel, xxxi, xxxiii, 83 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81 Benjamin, Walter: allegory of ruins, xxviii; on history, 23, 87, 195, 234 Bergson, Henri, 36; on memory, 21–28; on time, 25–27 Biely, Andrei, 26 Blake, William, 165–166 Blanchot, Maurice, 26–27 body: as architectural unit, 187; disembodied, 40; in place, 122 Boulez, Pierre, 232 Boym, Svetlana, 57, 226 Brighton, England, 5, 151–152, 155, 175

British Museum, London 106 Brooklyn, New York, 160 Burke, Edmund, 147 Burton, Robert, 47 Byron, Lord, 180 Cage, John, 13–14, 213 capitalism, xvii, xxviii, xxix, 86, 119–128 Carlyle, Thomas, 214–216 Casey, Edward, 121, 188; and place memory, 123; and place-cathexes, 123; on encounter, 128; on dwelling, 160, 164, 203; on nostalgia, 56; on shopping malls, 188; on site, 124–125; on wilderness, 128 Chambers, William, 81, 106 Chapman, Jeff, xi, 182, 185 Char, René, v, xii, 29 Chernobyl, Ukraine, 198, 206 childhood home, 202 Christianity, xvi, 45–48, 63, 86, 101; and earthly existence, 101; and the Fall, 47; as regressive, 86 Cicero, 56, 99 Cioran, E.M., 53, 64, 89 Comte, Auguste, 86 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 102, 103 corrosion, 106, 172, 176–178 cultural pessimism, xvii, xxi, 116–117, 119–120, 229, 231–233 curators, 239 cynicism, 116–117 Dada, 71–72, 82, 175 Dawkins, Richard, 232 de Man, Paul, 70 De Stijl, 208 Death Valley, California, 129–130 decay, xviii, 98–99, 182, 211, 218; against progress, 99; ancient view toward, 98; and Brighton, 151; and death, 241; and decline, 90; and destruction, 184, 194, 238–240; and imperfection, 102; and John Donne, 102; and morality, 101; and ontology, 97; and perfection, 95; and Plato, 98; and pleasure, 175; and progress, xix, 148; and Romanticism, 109; and

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•THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•

ruination, 130; and sublimity, 155; and transgression, 101; and uselessness, 165; and water, 158; as celebrated, 106; as insidious, 101; as perfection, 95; as picturesque, 159; cosmological, 102; domestication of, 141; ethics of, 189; Greek view toward, 98; history of, 97; in Mesopotamia, 98; in the alleyway, 158; natural, 226; object, xvii; of body, 40; of house, 62; of machines, 217; of staircase, 168; of staircases, 159; of the past, 202; of thought, 96; on the stoop sale, 160; place of, xxv; potential of, 241; process of, 121; resistance against, 227, 233; rhetoric of, 96; urban, xxvii, 145, 156, 178, 183, 191 Delacroix, Eugène, xii, 5, 100 delayed recognition, 37, 133 Democritus, xii, 5–6, 104–105 departure lounge, 161, 179, 186–189, 202 Derrida, Jacques, 29, 39, 73, 78, 135–136 Descartes, Rene, 68, 124, 258 desert, 46, 122, 124, 126, 129–130 destruction, 85, 141, 171, 196, 208, 230, 232; aesthetics of, 239; and decay, 100; and ethics, 184; and progress, 242 Detroit, Michigan, 145–146 Dickens, Charles, 32 Digges, Thomas, 102 Dollimore, Johnathan, 103 Donne, John, 102–103 Duchamp, Marcel, 137 dumpsters, 156 Dürer, Albrecht, 95 dwelling, 163, 167, 200; and lingering, 199; in the present, 198 dynamic stasis, 14–16, 21, 41, 91, 96, 133, 151, 245 dystopia, 205, 213, 214 Ecclesiastes, 101 Eco, Umberto, 168, 194 Egyptians, 97 Empedocles, 99 Ende, Michael, 223 Enlightenment: the, xvi–xvii, 64, 67, 73, 78, 80, 102 entropy, 85, 159, 183, 207, 215–217, 237, 240

Environmentalism, 230 Epictetus, 101 Epicureanism, 76–77, 99 epistemology, 67–68, 71–73 Estienne, Charles, 101 Eudemonia, 86 exile, 39, 51; and Christianity, 47 Existentialism, 82–83 faith: as home, 48; as reason, 86 Feyerabend, Paul, xxii–xxiii, 67, 253 fin de siècle, 74, 112–114, 117, 182, 185 fire-escape, 172 First World War, 72, 115 Flaubert, Gustave, 106 Fludd, Robert, 165 Foucault, Michel, 70, 76, 141, 253 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 42, 133; and the death instinct, 171; on history, 58, 61– 62; on soap, 207; on the uncanny, 30– 31, 131, 150 Friedlander, Saul, 75 Friedrich, Casper David, xii, 5, 79, 107, 108–109 Fukuyama, Francis, 74, 229 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 18–19 Gandy, Joseph, xii, 5, 106–107 Garden of Eden, 46 ghosts, 128, 134–136 Gilgamesh, 98 Gilpin, William, 106 Glendinning, Miles, 228–229 Gnosticism, 46 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 167, 180 Goodman, Godfrey, 102 graffiti, 146, 156, 190 Gray, John, 231–233 Gross, David, 111, 244 Ground Zero, New York City, 226 hangover: memories of, 187 Harbison, Robert, 60, 224 hauntology, 29, 135–136 heat death, 215–217 Hébert, Jacques, 80 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: and aesthetic dualism, 136; and aesthetic experience, 17; on architecture, 210; on history, 63 Heidegger, Martin, 38, 200; and homelessness, 54; and the four-fold,

•INDEX• 202, 207; and the Nothing, xxxiv, 5; on anxiety, 7; on dwelling, 199; on not being-at-home, 45; Heimat, 54 Henry VIII, 120 Heraclitus, 6, 99, 111, 253 Hill, Richard, 169 history, 61–63, 68, 74–75, 84–85, 88, 97, 142–143, 182, 184–185, 193, 195, 206, 225, 233, 235; absence of, 125; and memory, 37, 246; and nostalgia, 86; and ontology, 198; and Oswald Spengler, 114; and rational progress, 87, 89 114; as static, 87; end of, 74– 75, 84, 89, 195, 198, 229; estranged from, 194; failure of, 64, 115; in the ruin, 60, 136; industrial, 181; intellectual, 84; manipulation of, 61; modern, 101; natural, 90, 115; of a room, 62; of absolute past, 133; of destruction, 209, 234, 243; of memory, 238; of reason, 79, 84; of space, 133; of the staircase, 166; of the twentieth century, xxi; post, 194–195; remains of, 76, 195; revision of, 239; ruins of, 195–196; secularization of, 86; spatial, 62, 157, 224; static, 58; without rational progress, 86 Hofer, Johannes, 53 Hoffman, Eva, 41 Horkheimer, Max, 68, 73, 190 hotel lobby, xi, xxiii–xxiv, 161, 211–213 Hume, David, 85, 207 Husserl, Edmund, 9, 87 Huysmans, J.K., 109, 176–177, 180 Imber, England, 246 Impressionism, 81 industrial archaeology, 179–182 Janz, Bruce, 57 Jaspers, Karl, 7 jetlag, 187 Jetztzeit, 87–89 Julian, Philippe, 13, 17, 182 Jungk, Robert, 148 Kahn, Gustave, 110 Kali Yuga, 194 Kancheli, Giya, v, 7, 14–16, 41–42, 93, 245–247 Kant, Immanuel, xvii, xxii–xxiii, 68, 79, 147–148, 151 Kaufmann, Walter, 8

263

Kew Gardens, England, 106 Khnopff, Fernand, 17 kitsch, xvii–xviii, 58, 76, 150, 180, 206, 228, 240 Klee, Paul, 88 Kracauer, Siegfried, xxiii–xxiv, 211 Laing, R.D., 40 Le Corbusier, 190, 208 Lefebvre, Henri, 201, 225 Levinas, Emmanuel, 87 Lilith, 46 Locke, John, 35, 40, 59 Lombroso, Cesare, 113 Longinus, 147 Lowenthal, David, 101, 106, 228, 234– 235, 240 Lucretius, 99 Lyotard, Jean-François, 67–71; and machines, 217; and science, 71; on artificial intelligence, 215 Macarthur, Sally, 245 Macaulay, Rose, 137 machines, 72, 115, 132, 214–217 Mahler, Gustave, 81–82 mal de siècle, 110 Marx, Karl, 64, 86, 135 Mauclair, Camille, 13 McCarthy, Mary, 42–43 memorials, 136, 234 memory, 21–33, 35–38, 41–43, 55, 58, 60, 75, 103, 130–135, 160–162, 202, 224, 227–228, 233–240, 243–247; and place, 60– 63, 123–126; art of, 237; as external, 55; collective, 60; dissociation of, 57; ethics of, 239; habit, 22, 26; haunted, 28; involuntary, 28, 29; of destruction, 234; of violence, 15; politics of, 234; retention of, 227; traces, 59; unbound, 28, 32, 134; uncanny, 31; voluntary, 23 Mesopotamians, 97, 98 metanarrative, xvi, 69–77 Metzger, Gustav, xviii, 175–178, 252 Michaux, Henri, 164 Michigan Central Train Station, Michigan, 146 monuments, 223, 227; and history, 224; intentional and unintentional, 225; neglect of, 182 Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 227 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 81

264

•THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•

Nerval, Gerard de, 45 New York City, New York, 116 Newsted Abby, England, 120 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119; and amor fati, 112; and decay, 183; and knowledge, 166; on history, 233, 242–245; on place, 134; on progress, 185; on the Fall, 48; skepticism, 73 Ninfa, Italy, 141–145 Nora, Pierre, 224 Nordau, Max, 110, 113–115, 208 nostalgia: aesthetic, 182; and decline, 249; and irony, 76; and place, 56–57; and psychoanalysis, 54; as absolute, 65; as mournful, 58; as untimely, 245; atemporal, 179; for history, 232; for modern ruins, 236; for the absolute, 77; for the future, 64, 76, 229; impossibility of, 55; in Bachelard, 201; in Hegel, 64; in Heidegger, 204; in Mahler, 82; in postmodernity, 73; in the Psalms, 49; metaphysics of, 201; morbid memory, 244; origins, 53; placeless, 182; pre-emptive, 133 nostalgie de la boue, 58 Nothing, the, xvi–xviii, 4–9, 10–12, 16, 18–19, 96, 118, 130, 136–137, 150, 186, 196, 221–223, 242; and centrality, 221; and decay, 96; and ruins, 95; and silence, 12; as aesthetic experience, 18; holding out into, 172; knowing, 12; of the desert, 130 Novalis, 108, 256 “Now”, the, 87 ontology, xviii, 121, 135, 198–203, 209; and aesthetics, 151; denial of, 241 Paracelsus, 46 Parinibbana-Sutta, Maha, 97 Paris Opera House, Paris, 169 Parmenides, 6 Pascoe, David, 187 patina, 180, 246 Petronius, 102 Picon, Antoine, 173, 256 picturesque decay, 144, 159–160 Piper, John, 239 place, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 8, 12, 18, 23–25, 31–32, 42–43, 87, 97, 121–125, 157– 163, 167, 173, 179, 185–186, 188–190, 196–207, 209–214, 225, 233, 236–241; and nostalgia, 54–60; and temporal

threshold, 131; as altered, 131; center of, 124; childhood, 121; in distinction to space, 122; locality of, 121; loss of, 123, 188; of ruin, 128–136; unreal, 122 Plato, 19, 28–29, 98 Poe, Edgar Allan, 170, 210 Positivism, 86–87, 183 post-industrial sublime, xvii, 148–150 postmemory, 90 Postmodernism, xvi–xvii, 64–65, 67–83; and architecture, 209 Pripyat, Ukraine, 198, 206 Pristina, Kosovo, 142–143 progress, 86; march of, 90; moral, 67 Proust, Marcel, 25–28, 36, 38 Psalms, 49, 51 rational progress, xxii, xxv–xxviii, 80, 86, 89, 95, 121, 171, 183, 186, 199, 207, 232, 242, 249 reason, xxi–xxiv, xxvii, 36, 47–48, 55, 67–69, 72–74, 77–78, 84–89, 95–98, 104, 109, 116–119, 127, 136, 145– 148, 155–160, 173, 217, 223, 231– 234, 249; age of, 79; as sovereign, 63; end of, 195; failure of, 84; history of, 79–85; memory of, 194–195 relativism, 70, 78 reverie, 24, 36, 49, 160, 163 Riegl. Alois, 225–227 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56–58, 152–153 Rimbaud, Arthur, 19 Robespierre, Maximilien, 80 Romanticism, 81–82, 104, 107, 180–183 Rome: decline of, 99, 102; ruins of, 101 Rosa, Salvator, xii, 5, 104–105, 128–129 Roszak, Theodore, 231 ruins: abandoned, 81; ancient, 137, 145, 149; and centrality, 211; and dwelling, 199; and memory, 202, 238; and nonplaces, 189; and pillaging, 119; and place-names, 131; and spatial ordering, 130; and voyeurism, 184; artificial, 106; as a double, 133; as haunted, 136; as icon of decay, 102; as monumental, 143; as ornamental, 104; as place, 128; as progressive, 121; as rational, 147; as unreal, 218; dwelling in, 200; future of, 223, 249; in motion, 249; modern, 179, 211; natural, 184; of postmodernist architecture, 209; of war, 184; sound of, 212; the use of,

•INDEX• 178, 241; urban, 150, 229; ruins, artificial, 106 Ruskin, John, 106 rust, 131, 161, 172–178, 206 Rustavi Choir, 246 Said, Edward, 200 St. Cyprian, 96 St. Gregory of Nyssa, 101 St. John of the Cross, 50 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7–8, 83 Satie, Erik, 212–213 Scheuchzer, J.J., 53 Schnittke, Alfred, 42 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 216; on history, 89; on money, 119; on music, 13–15; vanity of existence, 37 Sebald, W.G., 24, 37, 43, 95, 155, 195, 196 Second World War, 54, 68, 166, 180, 199, 239 Seneca, 27, 101 Serialism, 82 sexton beetle, 39 Shiel, M.P., 196 shopping mall, 155, 161, 188, 202 silence: and violence, 12, 16, 96; as presence, 12, 48 Silvestrov, Valentin, 90, 117 site, 123, 206, 226; as place, 203 Situationism, 186 Soane, Sir John, xii, 5, 106–107 Sorkin, Michael, 125 Soviet Union: fall of, 14 space: and power, 186; as placeless, 125; naming of, 122; transient, 203; urban, 163 Spengler, Oswald, 95, 117, 193–194, 230; and machines, 214; and the city, 204; on progress, 114; on space, 126

265

Stirner, Max, 64 Stoicism, 101 storehouse: of memory, 35, 162, 201, 227 sublime, 147–148; in Kant, 148 Surrealism, 72, 166 Sutton, John, 59 Symbolism, 107, 110, 117, 252, 254 Talmud, the, 46 Tarkovsky, Andrey, 11, 158 teleology, 64, 88, 228 Templer, John, 169–170 Theater of Marcellus, Rome, 5, 144–145 thought without a body, 216 topoanalysis, 236–237 Tschumi, Bernard, 169, 184, 190, 208 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 43, 210–211, 217, 238 Tzara, Tristan, 72 urban exploration, xviii, 179, 185–186, 191 Venice, Italy, 106, 158 Vergara, Camilo José, 145 Verlaine, Paul, 111 Versöhnung, 83 Vico, Giambattista, 114 Virginia Water, England, 106 Virilio, Paul, 126–128 Wagner, Richard, 81, 110, 167–168 Warsaw, Poland, 206, 225, 239–240 Weber, Max, 124, West Pier, Brighton, 5, 151–152, 155, 175 White, Hayden, 75 Wilde, Oscar, 58, 103 wilderness: of Jeremiah, 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 26, 59, 69 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 168 Woodward, Christopher, 180 Yates, Frances A., 56, 237 Young, James E., 235

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