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
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
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
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Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
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on the Internet at http://dnb.ddb.de/.
Cover image courtesy of Damian Watson
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Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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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 Tarrying with the Nothing .................................................... 3
Two Silence, Violence, and Nothingness....................................11
Three An Uncanny Memory..........................................................21
Four The Specter of Exile.............................................................35
Five Dark Night of the Soul........................................................45
Six An Impossible Nostalgia......................................................53
Seven The Decline of Postmodernism? .........................................67
Eight The Revolt of Reason ..........................................................79
Part Two: Succumbing to Dissolution ...............93

Nine A Short History of Decay ....................................................95
Ten An Uncanny Place: Modern Ruins ...................................119
Eleven The Post-Industrial Sublime..............................................141
Twelve The Phenomenology of the Alleyway................................155
Thirteen Aesthetic Revulsion: Staircases and Rust..........................165
Fourteen Transgressing Place: Urban Exploration...........................179
Fifteen Space and Center: Ruins as Home ...................................193
Sixteen 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. De-
parture lounges, hotel lobbies, deserts, cafés, and ruins implicitly feature in
the background. I am indebted to these places. I am also indebted to numer-
ous 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 ker-
nels 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 Pe-
ter 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 De-
Silvey, Robert Lort, David Seamon, Ann Williams, Steve Mitchelmore, Ra-
chel 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 fam-
ily 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 po-
ems “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.
xiv •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
For permission to reproduce their following paintings, my sincere thanks

to: (1). Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, for permission to use Sal-
vator 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 Po-
lar Sea,” 1823–1824, Hamburger Kunsthalle. (4). Réunion des Musées Na-
tionaux, 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, be-
fore 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, reclaim-
ing it through self-conscious intercession. From this method, the mode of
consciousness with which the present age is identifiable is analyzed in a his-
torical context. Accordingly, this work evolves from a discussion of meta-
physics, 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 discur-
sion into fields not obviously related to the topic of ruins, (though simultane-
ously 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 introduc-
ing Heidegger’s idea of the Nothing. Through a reading of his lecture “What
is Metaphysics?,” I critically question Heidegger’s logic, particularly the cor-
relation 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 ana-
logue 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 Geor-
gian composer Giya Kancheli, I clarify this thesis concerning the bond be-
tween violence and silence, concluding that mourning is a form of
experiential silence. Nevertheless, so that silence can reclaimed by con-
sciousness, a hermeneutic relationship between the aesthetic object and the
subject engaging in that work must be set in place. The structure of the Noth-
ing therefore means that it must be positioned outside, in the aesthetics of si-
lence, 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
xvi •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
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 con-
founded by the multifaceted and opaque structure of consciousness. Examin-
ing 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, temporal-
centered model of consciousness and a non-linear and non-mediated experi-
ence 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 lo-
cates 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 resolu-
tion 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 ex-
ile by enforcing a redemptive guise upon it. What is required is an under-
standing 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 nos-
talgia guarantees its continuity. Unavailable, the object of nostalgia is imper-
vious to the fall from history, and is thereby idealized from the vantage point
of the present. The remainder of the chapter moves beyond individual nostal-
gia 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 postmodern-
ism, 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 un-
dermining the claim to a rational ideal. Examining Lyotard’s The Postmod-
ern Condition, I argue that the simple elimination of the “metanarrative”
does not entail a simultaneous elimination of nostalgia. This is evident in that
•PREFACE• xvii
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 pro-
tracted mourning against the collapse of reason, rather than a consistent at-
tempt to engage in a critique of reason.
Establishing that Postmodernism forms the plaintive lament toward rea-
son, the task of Chapter Eight is to trace the gradual decline of the Enlight-
enment’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 con-
cludes 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 Noth-
ing 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 an-
cient ruins with modern ones with the purpose of identifying a common
bond. Suggesting that the main divergence between the ancient and the mod-
ern is, respectively, the distinction between the beautiful and the post-
industrial sublime, after an overview of this division, I argue that for aesthet-
ics to rise above detached spectatorship, an element of sublimity is a pre-
requisite. In the case of ruins, this means relying on the volatility of decay.
xviii •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
Chapter Twelve and Chapter Thirteen confirm the previous argument by

venturing toward a phenomenology of the alleyway and broken staircase re-
spectively. 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 knowl-
edge 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 Gus-
tave Metzger.
Chapter Fourteen analyzes the contemporary manifestation of decline in
its everyday appearance. Urban exploration is the act of exploring urban ru-
ins and inaccessible sites. Here, I question the implications of urban explora-
tion in the context of spatial ordering. With reference to the work of Georges
Bataille, I discuss the relationship between trespassing and transgressing. Be-
cause 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 be-
tween 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 architec-
ture, 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 his-
toric significance and become kitsch artifacts, I put forward the view that ru-
ins 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 sub-
version, employing “praxis” to legitimize itself, sees the ruin as complete in
its fragmentation. If the fragmented quality of the ruin were restored to a to-
tality, 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
•PREFACE• xix
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 “cen-
trality.”
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 ex-
hausted 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 environ-
ment 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 transi-
tion; as for ‘realities’ we do not believe they will last. The ice that still supports peo-
ple 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 real-
ized? On the surface, the answer is positive. Despite the West’s fall into cul-
tural 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 phi-
losophical 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 re-
sisted such forces would only concede to the sovereignty of the former prin-
ciple. Instead of this retreat, the employment of reason gathers greater
violence, until a dialectic is formed whereby anti-progress and reason be-
come 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 nega-
tively. A lack of reason, led principally by “irrationalism,” generally, but im-
precisely, suggests anti-intellectual emotionalism and vague intuitionism.
The inclusion of emotion and intuition provide a clue to the foundation of
xxii •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
what reason aspires toward. If intuition is reactionary, then being overly ex-
posed to contextual circumstances, its judgment is said to be contingent. Rea-
son, meanwhile, is said to derive from an atemporal and placeless
(non)environment in which context is subjugated by necessity. Kant’s aes-
thetic formalism testifies to this lack of contextual content in its claim to dis-
interested delight. Through suppressing the particularity of context, aesthetic
universality is acquired at the expense of actual experience. Similarly, ra-
tional progress is won as reactions and instincts, particular qualities, are sus-
pended. 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 phi-
losophical 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 princi-
ple already established in the past. Such a use of reason does not entail an at-
tack 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 specu-
lates: “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 spe-
cial groups to call themselves ‘rationalists,’ to claim that widely recognized
•INTRODUCTION• xxiii
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 “ration-
alists.” 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 reaf-
firming 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 rea-
son 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 univer-
sality, depending, as it does, on formal rather than particular properties, plac-
ing 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 uncon-
sciously implicit is rendered self-consciously explicit, as Siegfried Kracauer
writes accurately, “The surface-level expression…by virtue of their uncon-
scious 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 in-
stance, becomes the platform through which ideas concerning the inversion
of secular space are manifest. As a result of this manifestation, space be-
comes 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 soci-
ety. 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 con-
text. In doing so, a hermeneutic relationship evolves in which the disclosure
of ideas is possible through a phenomenological analysis of the built envi-
ronment. 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 em-
bed themselves in that space requires careful consideration. Putting reason in
a spatial context means identifying what grounds reason, and thus what con-
xxiv •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
stitutes its disbanding. Mere analysis of space alone will not constitute a suf-
ficiently thorough examination of the structure of reason. Instead, reason
must precede space. Only in that way can the displacement of reason be iden-
tified. 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 trium-
phant, 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 Hei-
degger 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 par-
ticular 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 ab-
sence 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 an-
nihilates 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 de-
fined against the conscience of the anxious subject bears no relevance and is
rejected at the outset. Rather than being defined by a strictly redemptive di-
mension, 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 satis-
faction 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 question-
able prospect, not least because it supposes itself to be autonomous from mo-
rality, 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
•INTRODUCTION• xxv
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 al-
ter, it loses its clarity. Thus, if reason is centered around the will to perma-
nency, then the space which resists that drive will be vulnerable to
mutability, uncertainty, and fragmentation. Moreover, if reason prevents pro-
gress 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 origi-
nally conferred upon it, the ruin transgresses and subverts our everyday en-
counter 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 com-
modity of social servility which strives to maintain an abstract impression of
the past. Through being “rationalized” as historically significant, they sacri-
fice their original potency only to be redefined as delimited and prohibited
spaces. In the docility of ruins, preservation is enforced as the justified re-
xxvi •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
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 re-
minds us that the future may end in ruin. Their use outmoded, the negative
associations of the ruins are enforced. Nonetheless, the apparently unaes-
thetic quality of the ruin belies a force which disproves accusations of it be-
ing “ugly” and “wasted.” Instead of being relegated to the wastelands,
literally or otherwise, the ruin proves its epistemological value as it under-
mines the residue of certainty and so forges a new criterion for knowledge.
The aesthetic pleasure which derives from modern ruins, broadly a post-
industrial form of the sublime, is inextricably bound with the ontological as-
sertion 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 in-
stigate a reappraisal of the relationship between place and memory. Aestheti-
cizing 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 di-
luted. Mere delight means truncating the ruin’s dissolution.
IV
Despite being a marginalized topic, the present literature, research, and inter-
est 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 dem-
onstrate its application here.
•INTRODUCTION• xxvii
By allowing the ruin to exist on its own terms, without affixing to it a de-
terminate 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 ex-
ceeds its aesthetic merits and impressionistic evocations and becomes a sym-
bol able to redefine the concept of dwelling.
A disclaimer, then: while the representation of ruins and their social sig-
nificance 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 chal-
lenge 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 eco-
nomical and political considerations primarily risk disappointment here.
In writing this book, my overarching aim has been to address the rela-
tionship between reason, memory, and dwelling. My rationale has been in-
spired 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 be-
tween 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 prin-
ciple. 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. Phenomenologi-
cal 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 trans-
forming 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 pro-
ject 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 in-
fluential. According to Benjamin, in the absence of a theology which central-
xxviii •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
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 determi-
nacy 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 un-
raveling 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 Ben-
jamin’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 im-
age 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. Un-
der 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 ap-
pear surplus. But by dint of their wasted constitution, ruins shatter the myth
of rational progress and permanency, in their abundance and in their neces-
sity. 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,
•INTRODUCTION• xxix
while the present book is implicitly indebted to Benjamin’s analysis of capi-

talism, 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

• C H A P T E R O N E •
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 in-
structed 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 re-
member it. For the protagonist in Beckett’s novel, to say, “nothing had hap-
pened” 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 some-
thing 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 negat-
ing, without it ever being isolated as such. Can we infer that nothingness is
an “impure” concept, relying upon “something” for its foundation? To con-
sider 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
4 •THE AESTHETICS OF DECAY•
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 pres-
ence 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 Noth-
ing 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 preoccupa-
tion with “uncovering the original meaning of Being,” a meaning that he be-
lieves 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 as-
pect (that is, as a Being) is neglected. Western metaphysics and science, ac-
cording to Heidegger, has only concerned itself with the “what” of being:
what is manifest in its outward representation. Physics, chemistry, and biol-
ogy are engaged with the specific aspects of phenomena which, being essen-
tial to experience, remain dependent upon and presuppose the underlining
Being for their existence. A mistaken reliance on particular disciplines, sug-
gests Heidegger, coupled with a conviction that epistemologically such dis-
ciplines 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
•TARRYING WITH THE NOTHING• 5
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 them-
selves which are prior to the ontical sciences and which provide their founda-
tions” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 2). By inverting the priority that the ontic
dimension has over the ontological dimension, Heidegger will seek to re-
claim 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 es-
say 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 noth-
ing 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 won-
der 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: “phenomenol-
ogy 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 phenome-
nology 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 simul-
taneously. 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-
servedly. With the arrival of Parmenides, the Heraclitean flux grew in disre-
pute. For Parmenides, we can investigate what does exist or we can investi-
gate 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 sub-
ject of inquiry must be existent. Through studying the Nothing in terms of
logic alone, Parmenides’ thought had the consequence of implying a non-
spatial, non-temporal existence that suggests no conciliation of change.
Aware of Parmenides’ error, Democritus sought to resolve the conflict be-
tween being and nothingness by emphasizing the roles of atoms in the void.
For Heidegger, Democritus’ atomism defines itself as a characteristic of be-
ing, 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 inef-
fective. 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 appear-
ances, 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.
Heidegger’s account of anxiety is characterized by an existential frame-

work that takes its inspiration from Kierkegaard, and was later adopted by
Sartre, Jaspers, and Marcel. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a call to the vertigi-
nousness 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 re-
sponsible 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, anxi-
ety, 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 on-
tologically.
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 Noth-
ing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are be-
ings—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, free-
dom, 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 anxi-
ety and the Nothing demonstrates a persuasive logic that relies on the ineffa-
bility 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-
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 un-
furls 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 anxi-
ety 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, “Heideg-
ger’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 spe-
cific quality, so enforcing a metaphysical impression. As a result, the ques-
tion 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 ‘metaphysi-
cal’ 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 con-
scious 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 Meta-
physics?,” 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).
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 origi-
nally 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 demon-
strate 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 re-
claim the Nothing from its anxious roots and place it within a spatial realm
while simultaneously retaining its metaphysical significance. Insofar as Hei-
degger has correlated the experience of anxiety with the metaphysics of the
Nothing, I am in disagreement. In the present context, I will make two as-
sumptions. 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.
• C H A P T E R T W O •
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, transfig-
ured 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 phi-
losophical 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 consis-
tent 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, how-
ever vague it might be, but unless we can distance ourselves from the giddi-
ness 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 en-
forcing 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 proc-
ess. To this extent, the notion of pure inquiry would be illogical. If the Noth-
ing 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 fortui-
tous 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
is: does the phenomenology of experience disclose an allusion to nothing-

ness, whereby we can reconstruct a pathway that is otherwise lost in pure in-
quiry?
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 per-
petually 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 indis-
tinguishable. Instead, the background morphs into the foreground and vice-
versa. 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. Si-
lence must emerge and thereafter define itself by a disjunctive origin that
renders the space intrinsically negative. We come into contact with this abso-
lute form of silence when it arises from a violent dynamic that explodes be-
fore subduing. In this lingering subduing, the possibility of the presence of
silence occurs.
How, then, shall we form an impression of this dynamic between vio-
lence and silence? An utterance of language cannot occur without it inter-
rupting 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 re-
claimed 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
•SILENCE, VIOLENCE, AND NOTHINGNESS• 13
having a language of its own. This is confirmed in Schopenhauer’s persua-

sive 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 Represen-
tation (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 hierarchi-
cal 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 indi-
viduation. 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 them-
selves…” (Ibid., p. 261).
By relating the metaphysical properties of music to the experience of si-
lence, 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 vio-
lence thus fails to attain silence. John Cage’s “4’33” is exemplary in this re-
spect. 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 audi-
ence is sharpened by their expectations, and they perceive the inevitable in-
advertent noises in the concert hall (even the quietest ones) as a kind of pre-
music” (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 abstrac-
tion. 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 vio-
lence leaves.
II
To the extent that silence is bound with the violence that precedes it, its con-
summated 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 be-
comes the existential and so sounds the voice of revolt, anguish, and loss.
Aesthetically, Kancheli’s music is oriented around this polarity between si-
lence 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 pre-
pared 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 mu-

sic, 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 evoca-
tion 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. Thereaf-
ter, the aspiration toward ascent is gradually thwarted by increasingly fre-
quent 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, be-
tween the reticent speculation of melody and the violent oppression of
rhythm, allows the space in between to hang as a mournful silence that con-
veys the recovery of the violence. In the coda to Kancheli’s “Sixth Sym-
phony,” 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 vio-
lence 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 vio-
lence. The determinate silence which framed the “Sixth Symphony” is dis-
placed by an immediate discordance, restraining any preceding modulation
with the oppressive suppression of the first chord. The dissonance that shad-
ows 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 “si-
multaneous 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 prefig-
ures the memento mori chord. The reserved opening is again shattered. Yet
out of that disruption, musical space becomes formless. The minor sixth oc-
cupies a point in between space, mediating the arrival of violence, but itself
becoming a presence of silence simultaneously. The tension inherent in the
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 concep-
tion. 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 aes-
thetically in the act of dynamic stasis, to expose the absence violence leaves,
which aligns with the structure of mourning. Mourning, therefore, is the de-
serted 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 ex-
posed 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 aes-
thetic consciousness. The thread uniting consciousness with the aesthetic ob-
ject 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)
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 in-
ner” (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 objec-
tivity 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, com-
pletely devoted to its interior spectacle” (cited in Jullian, 1971, p. 261). Ob-
jectifying the subjective presupposes the prior existence of the object within
the subject. Already known means that the past is now re-presented aestheti-
cally, 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 un-
consciousness.
The criterion for establishing the moment of recognition does not, how-
ever, necessarily entail a direct correspondence between subject and object.
The recognition of the past, now represented aesthetically, compels a mo-
ment of strange familiarity in which neither consciousness nor the object dis-
covers 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 it-
self 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 re-
storing it to itself (Hegel, 1993, p. 15).
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 nothing-
ness is temporally particular and limited. If thinking about the nothing in spa-
tial 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 rep-
resentation, also temporal, implicates a mode of hermeneutic engagement. I
follow Gadamer in defining hermeneutics “as the bridging of personal or his-
torical 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 in-
terpreting 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 dis-
tinction from the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen marking the dif-
ference 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 unfa-
miliar continuation of past fragments will become, for us, the means by
which a hermeneutic relationship with lived place reveals the temporal prop-
erty able to convey the Nothing. As subjective consciousness recognizes it-
self 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
writes, “Goethe’s statement ‘Everything is a symbol’ is the most comprehen-

sive 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 confirma-
tion 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 contem-
plate beauty” (Plato, 1997, p. 451). With Plato, aesthetic contemplation arises
by sacrificing the sensible world for a world of Forms. The beauty of the sen-
sory 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 har-
mony the Forms denote. Platonic poets are mimics of the Form they seek to
convey. The aspect of expression is hence extraneous. For Plato, if objectiv-
ity 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 in-
spired 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 sen-
suous 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 corre-
sponding 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.
• C H A P T E R T H R E E •
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. Aes-
thetic experience only completes itself when the object of aesthetic contem-
plation is discovered by the self: that is, when the reciprocity between subject
and object is established. Otherwise, space is reduced to a thing. A corre-
spondence is required which binds the deserted space that nothingness occu-
pies with the mind observing that space. When we integrate the previous
chapter—the glimpse of the Nothing through silence, the disruption that pre-
ceded 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, noth-
ingness 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 con-
structed with reference to something outside of the object, a context that ex-
ists elsewhere. The object that I hold before me, according to Bergson, is
mine insomuch as it is interpreted through my own memories and associa-
tions. Bergson writes, “Perception is never mere contact of the mind
with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which com-

plete 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 physi-
cal and sensuous reaction. That implicates a failure in the form of an unthink-
ing mass of material, namely, the body. If pure perception is unattainable,
then the Kantian thing-in-itself will remain unknown to consciousness be-
cause 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 memo-
ries 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 be-
havior (Bergson, 2004, p. 87). The body aids in the mediation between mem-
ory and matter, and so implicates its involvement in habit memory. Due to
the exteriority of this association between memory and physicality, con-
sciousness 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 pro-
gress; 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 ne-
glects 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 assess-
ment 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 evoca-
tion of the past, despite the elevation of such memory to the “model of mem-
•AN UNCANNY MEMORY• 23
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 annihila-
tion 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 imperson-
ality 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 produc-
tion 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 recog-
nized 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 impli-
cates an impetrative to readdress the so far “misunderstood…true nature of
memory” (Ibid., p. 103). Let us phenomenologically observe how this disrup-
tion 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 semi-
consciousness, the slumbering of memory can withdraw as reverie shadows
volition. Unexpected and chance encounters thus invoke a realm already fa-
miliar 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 conversa-
tions, allowing faint smells, tastes, and colors to revive memories buried be-
neath 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 un-
fold, 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 me-
diation 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-
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 op-
posite” (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 fragmenta-
tion, is rendered accessible. Yet the image is precarious, its closure antici-
pated. 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 dis-
tance 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 dis-
embodied. Sheltering in the unreality of the imagined memory, thus we re-
main 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 ab-
sence, 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 am-
biguous between past and present, Proust remarks:
The past still lives in us…has made us what we are and is remaking us every mo-
ment! … 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
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 abstrac-
tion, 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 Berg-
son, is an artifice used to analyze reality into relative intelligibility. Berg-
son’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 du-
ration 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 spa-
tial time, the poet must subvert causality along with the linearity this causal-
ity denotes by severing the traditional structure of poetic narrative. This
severance, as it would be in Bergson, manifests itself through intuitive intro-
spection, 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 in-
tellectual 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
else, through language. After the Surrealists, the rigidity of language was
contested with automatic writing, a notion borrowed from Freud. For Blan-
chot, “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 discontinu-
ous: “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 repre-
sentation of the past as past becomes impossible. If that were the case, then
two temporal memories would lose their identity by being inseparable. In-
stead, 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 sym-
bolize 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, re-
veals 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, mo-
bile, and almost fluid representation” overcomes the rigorous tendency to-
ward 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 as-
pect 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 represen-
tation 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
discloses the unbinding of memory as the past attains a delicate totality. The
disruption of normal consciousness, which we can now term “historic con-
sciousness” 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 im-
pression 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 to-
gether. 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 sym-
bolic 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 be-
tween memory and time, discordance arises linking the natural surge of con-
sciousness 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 con-
sciousness 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
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 re-
turned 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 aware-
ness 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 re-
membrance of an absent image, a problem inherited from Plato. Conscious-
ness, 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 cen-
tered on the irresolution of memory. It is irresolute because that memory be-
comes 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 sur-
roundings, examining the manifestation of this centerless absence will clarify
to what extent the past determines the present. The phenomenology of invol-
untary memory resounds with melancholic fascination as we encounter an
object that, while still persisting in space and time, is displaced from its na-
tive context and so points to an elsewhere that is no longer. Simple occu-
pancy 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 reflec-
tion of itself estranged as it confounds temporal categories. Yet the reflection
fails to harmonize with the present. While evoking a memory already inti-
mate to consciousness, the object is simultaneously foreign. Reassuring and
melancholy concurrently, the object reminds us of a past which existed out-
side of the recollected past. At the same time, the object affirms the disrup-
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-of-
place object, in Freud’s account of the “uncanny” we discover an obvious
correlation. Whereas the present account of the familiarity of the distant im-
age is rendered possible by an irresolute silence caused through a violent
severance between inter-personal consciousness, Freud suggests that the un-
canny 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). Consti-
tuting 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 Sand-
Man,” 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 cer-
tain 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 child-
hood 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.
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 alle-
giance 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 manifesta-
tion 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 associa-
tions 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 memo-
rable 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-
sent place and past object conspire to render each other haunted. Simultane-
ously, the identity of past and present becomes bound. When the present be-
comes 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 oth-
erwise 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 disillu-
sioned recluse rather than seek escape through abjuration. The manipulation
is telling. Her reluctance to separate herself from the point of affliction en-
tails 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 repre-
senting a denial of her abandonment, Miss Havisham’s behavior embodies a
vacuous freedom forged through the negation of the present replaced by a de-
termined 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 progres-
sively 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 ob-
jectification 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 con-
sciousness locates itself with selective reference to the past. A point of phe-
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 physi-
cally through the chance encounter of the past object displaced from its con-
text. 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.
• C H A P T E R F O U R •
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 col-
lection of my experiences,” says the essentialist. Yet the historic self, evoked
by memory, or the “storehouse of our Ideas,” to use John Locke’s question-
able expression, is a perfunctory glimpse into introspective experience
(Locke, 1996, p. 83). At best, historic consciousness is justifiable as an arti-
fice used to “linearize” consciousness into temporal symmetry. Because we
are able to measure our experience in terms of lived time, a sense of our be-
ing 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 ex-
periences 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 as-
pect of consciousness, and not, conversely, the exterior formal aspect, is
logical and consistent. Proust writes:
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 conscious-
ness confronting memory, fall by the wayside. The reverie acts otherwise.
Without a certain division between cause and effect, temporal categories be-
come 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 land-
scape 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 pre-
sent 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 passing-
through 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 anticipa-
tion. 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, be-
cause 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
•THE SPECTER OF EXILE• 37
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 mem-
ory” (Sebald, 2002 p. 255). In this way, the experience of temporal-
experience 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 dis-
cover the ruinous foundation of temporal stability prefigured through a con-
sideration of the “vanity of existence” (Schopenhauer, 2000, p. 282). For
Schopenhauer, the constant becoming of existence precludes satisfaction, in-
deed 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 annihila-
tion of value coincides with the mutability of material existence. Yet
Schopenhauer goes further. The destruction of temporal continuity also de-
stroys 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 con-
sciousness does its best to retrieve memory. The work is played out exter-
nally 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 repro-
ductions, 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
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 hauntologi-
cally structured, and how a memory that can no longer find resolution in ex-
perience 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 cen-
ter 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 shel-
tered by certainty, it becomes determined by the desire for a fixed site, a re-
turn 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 ac-
tivity, for therein it is conscious that its essence is only its opposite, is con-
scious only of its own nothingness” (Ibid., p. 127). Hegel is right. In its
mediation, thought tacitly stakes a claim to the home. Even Heidegger con-
cedes: “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,
before finally burying the cadaver in fresh soil. Why? So that when the fe-
male 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 pre-
digested 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 un-
dergo 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 pre-
sent-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 re-
course to repression, and so establishing a false home, the home loses con-
viction. In place of assurance, the desire for home is intensified, not subdued.
With the past elsewhere, the ordering of the empirical world proves ques-
tionable. 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 re-
deem themselves in the absence of direct experience. With unity demolished,
the unfulfilled and unfulfilling desire places consciousness into a state of ex-
ile.
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 pre-
sent 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
naiveté that consciousness adopted prior to its becoming aware of the exte-
rior self is therefore crushed, so creating a double-consciousness. Self-
consciousness has become its own ruin. The self that is bound to conscious-
ness 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 es-
sential 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 be-
tween time and place. Like an extraneous object, no longer tractable, the
body hangs in suspended time. Yet as a biophysical entity, consciousness en-
dures. 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 ex-
ternal 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, ‘in-
ner,’ ‘true’ self looks on at with tenderness, amusement, or hatred as the case may be
(Laing, 1965, p. 69).
This voyeuristic position frames the diversion between the outward iner-
tia of the lower body and the temporal discontinuity of the exiled conscious-
ness. 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 cul-
ture is absolute—it is to discover that even the most interstitial and seem-
ingly 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 illus-
trated in the music of Giya Kancheli.
In Kancheli’s recent orchestral piece “à la Duduki” (1995), volatile dis-
unity between two polarities creates a tension against which the dynamic be-
tween the home and the non-home is played out. This is manifest primarily in
agitated neo-Baroque melodies, which struggle against full orchestral out-
bursts. 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 ostensi-
bly 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 de-
termined 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 un-
canny 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, some-
thing 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.
In Kancheli, we observe how the dual consciousness of exile is com-

pounded 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 reve-
lation, 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 refer-
ence 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 conscious-
ness 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. Vo-
litional consciousness, a censor of the unconsciousness, to echo Freud, disal-
lows a direct correspondence with the past. Instead, the remnants of memory
seep in between the order and regularity of consciousness, allowing the ex-
iled 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 Atti-
tudes and Values, Yi-Fu Tuan describes topophilia as the condition of ascrib-
ing 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
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, remem-
brance 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 revolu-
tionist, lives on hopes and schemes. There is something of both in every exile, an os-
cillation 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 ac-
quired without it falling prey to estrangement is a vocation ruined. The expo-
sure 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,” recog-
nizes Gaston Bachelard with devastating clarity (Bachelard, 1994, p. 58). We
will now examine the extent to which this specter of exile informs the per-
manent structure of our consciousness.
• C H A P T E R F I V E •
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 be-
ing-in-time yet never wholly being-as-such, has its archetypal form. As Hei-
degger 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 al-
chemy 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
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 origi-
nal 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 de-
sires, Lilith fled the Garden of Eden, sought out Yahweh (God), and thereaf-
ter 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 copu-
lating 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 to-
gether, 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
•DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL• 47
writes: “this noble creature…is fallen from that he was, and fortified his es-
tate, become a wretched manikin, a castaway, a caitiff, one of the most mis-
erable 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 some-
thing different from that of its otherness. The Garden is seen as an elsewhere,
humanity is distinct from divinity, and particular life, embodied and tempo-
ral, is opposed to eternity. What emerges from this banishment is a disruption
of the undifferentiated. Accordingly, human beings are thrust into the spatial-
temporal and there experience the basic polarities between being and becom-
ing. 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 re-
demption, 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 Deu-
teronomy (32:10). Only through the existence of the wilderness does redemp-
tion become possible.
From the Christian perspective, exile necessitates resolution. Already
home is established in the moment of displacement. Isaiah (40 to 55) pro-
claims 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 re-
nunciation of hegemony in place of an inversion of history consummates it-
self 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, previ-
ously 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
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 it-
self and God in question. Knowing that self-consciousness was a conse-
quence 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 him-
self 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 be-
lieves 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. No-
mads too, in removing themselves from the position of any locus standi, are
able to see the world as a phenomenon without an audience. Acquiring dis-
tance 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 configu-
ration. 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
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 par-
ticular 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 be-
cause of the oppression of the enemy?” (Psalms, 42:9). Despite the unfamili-
arity 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 de-
ity, 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-
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 depriva-
tion is heightened by his antithetical state: “The soul is conscious of a pro-
found 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 empti-
ness 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 ex-
perienced through God’s absence is considered by the mystic to be constitu-
tive 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 mul-
tiplicity to unity, from differentiated disorder to undifferentiated order, and
from becoming to Being. The logic is evident: what it is to establish the con-
trast between self and other, presence and absence, and being and nothing-
ness if the self is absent?
So that the solace of the forsaken home was shown to be a process of ne-
gation 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 there-
fore 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-
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 some-
thing reflected in a non-spherical world, consciousness desires a fixed spa-
tial-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 imag-
ined, is fundamental. “Philosophy,” Novalis once wrote, “is really homesick-
ness, 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.
• C H A P T E R S I X •
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 ge-
ometry. Deriving from the Greek nostos, “to return home,” and algos, “pain,”
the word was coined by a seventeenth century Swiss medical student, Johan-
nes Hofer. In his dissertation referring to Swiss mercenaries relocated from
their homes, Hofer described nostalgia as homesickness to the point of pa-
thology. 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 Fa-
therland 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 spatio-
physical diagnosis of nostalgia, the antidote of homecoming, even the prom-
ise of it, was entirely plausible. Hence, when another German-Swiss physi-
cian, 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 bloodlet-
ting. 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 nine-
teenth 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
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 specu-
lation, at worst an echo of nationalism. Any such aspiration to a home fixed
under the guise of permanency was viewed as a maudlin affectation. Heideg-
ger 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 res-
ervation. Germany’s rupture after the war, in its physical and mental land-
scape, was immense. Despite this, Heidegger’s reaction to the suffering was
regressive. While the possibility of cosmopolitanism was embraced, Heideg-
ger was concerned with the reunification of Germany as the Heimat, remark-
ing 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 re-
vert to the pre-reflective diagnosis of nostalgia as geographical displacement,
and that alone. His failure to grasp homesickness in temporal terms is espe-
cially striking given the attention time receives in Being and Time. The omis-
sion 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 imagina-
tion, 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 re-
sult 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 tem-
porality, 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
•AN IMPOSSIBLE NOSTALGIA• 55
comes to affix itself toward that absent time-place. I propose that we now ob-
serve how this desire instills a place of estrangement and unreality by phe-
nomenologically considering childhood spatiality.
The impossibility of nostalgia predicates itself on the desire for the ab-
sent. 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 disso-
ciation 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 unreal-
ity...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 ex-
perience becomes lucid. This realization that space and place fall from cer-
tainty 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 ex-
plicit: 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 imagi-
nation calls upon an already lived past to reconstruct an indeterminate pre-
sent. When we return, a collision between past and present invokes an
uncertainty in memory. Place refuses to be placed and so becomes over-
whelmingly 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 rea-
son that the form of place persists while the remaining content simultane-
ously 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
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 im-
age 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 particu-
lar 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 pre-
sent” (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 un-
timely 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 acqui-
escence 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 insis-
tence that the past ought to be rigid if not wholly unalterable. Intuition de-
mands that mental memories align (and so reconcile) with spatial memories.
When this unity is destabilized, the remembered reality of the past does in-
deed 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-
tributed inside me: here one room, there another, and here a bit of corri-
dor…thus the whole thing is scattered about inside me” (Ibid., p. 57). The
scattering of space coincides with the dissociation of memory, and so en-
forces the sense that the past is gradually becoming externalized to the pre-
sent as an estranged entity. “Nostalgia takes the shape of a maze composed
of many visible and invisible cities, including the native one,” writes Svet-
lana 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 de-
finitive 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 real-
ized 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 ap-
peal is still enticing, knowing that any such contact with the object is impos-
sible. A sense of attraction emerges, whereby a sufficient distance is acquired
from the object, rendering it an aesthetic object: “For beauty is nothing but
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 dis-
comfort is preferable to a present the appeal of which is its passing.
The question remains: despite the inherently specious foundation of nos-
talgia, 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 be-
comes 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? Intui-
tion suggests otherwise. Endemically, the past is tinged with value and cele-
bration. Delighted by relics, preoccupied with origins, and appeased by
kitsch, the past imbues the present and also forms it. “Only a good-for-
nothing,” 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 Berg-
son, 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
history, we are led to believe that we can avoid or improve our unfolding nar-
rative. 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 suppos-
edly 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 obso-
lete acquire their own dignity and inviolability through the fact that the pre-
serving 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 construc-
tion of identity. John Locke’s theory of personal identity has proved its ap-
peal 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 ar-
gument 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 suppo-
sition that memories are able to be preserved through representation. What
does it mean to say that memories are preserved through representation? Tra-
ditionally, 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). Distinguish-
ing 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-
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 tempta-
tion is to argue that mere material is transformed into memory-imbued mate-
rial 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 es-
tablishes a constant reminder of an event which is grounded in the assump-
tion that the act of destruction imparted a trace upon the building.
Architecturally, the memory trace manifests itself as the structural nega-
tion 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 re-
construction of experience can only ever allude to what was experienced:
“One is asked to imagine creeks running red with blood,” writes Robert Har-
bison of artificially ruined monuments, “and the noise and confusion of bat-
tle, 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 prox-
imity of the monument. Being memorable does not, of course, mean being
momentous. Often it is the most banal events that become the most remem-
bered. With the monument acting as a backdrop, the event becomes inextri-
cably 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 experi-
ence 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-
sion between the past and the present is aggravated, rendering history a per-
nicious 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 individu-
ality: “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 antiquar-
ian simultaneously considers the past capable of being resurrected. For this
possibility to emerge, “the past would have to be overlooked if it was to pro-
duce 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 recol-
lection 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 fu-
ture generations. Time collapses for the antiquarian: “The history of his city
becomes the history of himself” (Ibid., p. 73). In deeming the historic sover-
eign, 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 de-
grees of consciousness: “in mental life nothing which has once been formed
can perish—that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable cir-
cumstances (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 sur-
veys. Visitors exploring that city will be more adept at reconstructing the
city’s past the greater their topographical knowledge, taking into considera-
tion ruins and also the restoration of those ruins in the process. Such an ac-
count suggests that the past never entirely disintegrates, but integrates itself
morphologically into the present. In the absence of an explicit historical nar-
rative, 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 as-
sured. 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 exis-
tence will have passed away and all the earlier phrases of development con-
tinue alongside the latest one,” so that, “where the Coliseum now stands we
could at the same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House,” the conclu-
sion 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 identi-
fiable 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 possi-
ble “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 ex-
periences undergo the process of becoming memories. Likewise, place
erodes, thus being manipulated as new experiences are created. Freud’s as-
sertion 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 embel-
lishing 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 dis-
solves. Irrevocable change in material objects serves to annihilate the mem-
ory 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.
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 an-
other. 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 altera-
tion, debunking the monumental and antiquated version of history. Philoso-
phically, 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, becom-
ing 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 pre-
ceding epoch is characterized by a development that, isolated from its con-
text, 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 his-
tory, the will of the Oriental subject is external to itself, while freedom is re-
served 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 de-
mocratic minority. Yet the intra-dependence between citizen and state, mani-
fest 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 mate-
rial one (Ibid., p. 412). Because of this, human consciousness finally be-
comes free. The concern of the Enlightenment is to render this freedom
actual. In reaching the Enlightenment, Hegel has reached himself, and his ac-
count of world history ends in his lecture hall. By positing a teleological ac-
count 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 con-
sciousness 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 move-
ments of history are necessary. In submitting to a nostalgic future, Hegel ac-
knowledges 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 con-
tingency, 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 cen-
tury: Kierkegaard’s onus on the subjective, Schopenhauer’s personal and phi-
losophical derision of Hegel, Marx’s emplacement of Hegelian metaphysics
in an economic mode, Max Stirner’s egoism, and finally Nietzsche’s demoli-
tion 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 dis-
ruption 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-
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 ab-
solute. 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.
• C H A P T E R S E V E N •
The Decline of Postmodernism?
Repentance is part of post-modernity.

Baudrillard (1995, p. 35)
I
When postmodernism rejected the Enlightenment notion of foundational ra-
tionality, it appeared to reject the logic of the Absolute. Originally conceived
to undermine dogmatic faith through rational means, the Enlightenment as-
pired to reclaim the spirit of progression from the Renaissance. At its center,
the Enlightenment sought to reduce social and political notions to the scru-
tiny of public “Reason.” Inspired by the progress in science, equivalent pro-
gression was thus thought possible for humanity. Moral progress meant a
rationalization of the animalistic, uncivilized, and irrational. Because the irra-
tional was associated with contingency, subjectivity, and the impermanent,
objectivity became sovereign. Distorting the “natural light” of reason, pas-
sion 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 ab-
straction, rationality, order, and linearity exist only insofar as they are ma-
nipulated 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 prin-
cipal that aligns an ethical or epistemological “ought” with the value that ap-
pears 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” (Feyera-
bend, 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 sup-
poses a normative mode of epistemology in which thought aspires to a defi-
nite 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-
able since the Second World War. By way of ascertaining whether postmod-
ernism 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 tran-
scendental 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 con-
cept of the active mind, which determines the object in accordance with un-
conscious motives and desires, marks a central struggle in modern
philosophy. The “emancipation” of the subject falters as the subject recog-
nizes 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 over-
powered the objective world. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes, “A dia-
lectics 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 epis-
temological vertiginousness. Because non-identity refuses to present con-
cepts in such a way that they appear continuous, such a mode of thought
leaves open the residue of history and knowledge: “discontinuity and univer-
sal 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).
• T H E D E C L I N E O F P O S T M O D E R N I S M ?• 69
Adorno’s model of fragmented knowledge, together with his critique of

instrumental reason as a political tool, establish the conditions for philoso-
phy’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 heed-
fulness of the construction and structure of language. The refinement of phi-
losophy through the analysis of semantic statements, evident in Frege and
Wittgenstein, although now beginning to lose its sway in academic philoso-
phy, meant that subjectivism became outmoded as private thoughts were re-
placed 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 specula-
tive 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 lan-
guage games” (Lyotard, 1984, p. 113). Whereas the classical model of lan-
guage 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 re-
peated in the outmoding of grand events to their contextual counterparts.
With the little-narrative engineered by students and workers in the 1968 évé-
nements, 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 refer-
ence to a metadiscourse of this kind making an explicit appeal to some grand narra-
tive, 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)
Lyotard’s “incredulity” toward the metanarrative is central to the tempo-

rally 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 to-
ward the metanarrative manifests itself in a discursive and playful fashion.
The arbitrary distinction that modernity made between concepts and mean-
ing, informing a hierarchy of being, was able to be challenged from the
postmodernism perspective, since the objective validity of truth and false-
hood 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, no-
tably, 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 pro-
duction 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 be-
half of collective peoples. Paul de Man famously wrote, “Nothing can over-
come 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 insidi-
ous 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 instiga-
tion of “scientific facts” only becomes defensible in the context of the
metanarrative. In relying upon the metanarrative for the validity of its truth,
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 in-
corporated into the metanarratives of a subject that guarantees their legiti-
macy” (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 postmod-
ernism’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 be-
cause 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 dis-
sent 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 re-
marked 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.
III
While the Romantics opposed reason with passion, redeeming the error of
reason in the process, Dada’s split from reason was more radical. Dialecti-
cally, 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 pre-
ciseness 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 ren-
dered dignified, and banal satires on the still life. An example: Hugo Ball, the
inventor of Dadaist phonetic poetry, draped in azure cloth and golden card-
board, with a cylindrical shaman’s hat on his head, chanting poetry in a man-
ner 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 “ra-
tional” violence. That the intensity of revolt would be consumed through its
own nihilism was a necessary path for Dada. The disparaging aspect of Sur-
realism 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 non-
historic, 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 ab-
sence. The annihilating implosion that Dada presupposes excludes the im-
pression 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-
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 pen-
chant for a “little narrative” plainly echoes a substitution for a lost modernity.
In the rejection of the metanarrative, the danger emerges that the little narra-
tive 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 em-
ployed, a claim constructed by Nietzsche a hundred years before postmod-
ernism:
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 non-

privileged 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 ra-
tionality in postmodernism are central in the creation of the fixed postmod-
ernist identity.
Distinguishing itself from the Enlightenment notion of universal rational-
ity has not meant that postmodernism has dispensed with rationality alto-
gether. Unlike Horkheimer and Adorno’s consistent consideration of
instrumental reason as domination, the postmodernist skepticism toward ra-
tionality has translated as the preservation of a rationality, which enables the
previous rationality to be demythologized. The particular logic of postmod-
ernism, as rationally consistent as the Enlightenment claim to universal rea-
son, 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
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 ra-
tionality, postmodernism involves a mode of nostalgia that depends on what
was annihilated to affirm itself in the temporal present. Because of this nega-
tive 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 im-
passe. 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 re-
adapted in a politically dubious format by Francis Fukuyama, is no longer
possible because history refuses to catch up with itself. A gradual disintegra-
tion of temporality, framed by the distorting influence of the media, technol-
ogy, 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, his-
tory is defined as a “chaotic formation.” Baudrillard writes:
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in which accelera-

tion puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created by acceleration deflects his-
tory 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 no-

tion 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 recog-
nizable 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 at-
tack on temporal closure, the enemy of a false fin de siècle does not immu-
nize 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-
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 be-
ing able to consider the closure of the end of history without positing a post-
historical 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 postmodern-
ism. 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 ques-
tionable in postmodernism, since narrative is always open to a differing per-
spective. 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 nar-
rative is thus maintained for the same reasons that the metanarrative is re-
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 ten-
sion between postmodernism and the past. In place of temporal linearity,
temporal disjunction serves the role of disrupting historical narrative. Hyper-
reality, Baudrillard’s term, indicates a loss of reality whereby distinctions be-
tween 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 postmodern-
ism’s remedy to this devaluation of former values. In turn, this ironic rela-
tionship to the past discloses postmodernism’s irresolute nature and
protracted nostalgia, if not for the past, then for the future. Baudrillard face-
tiously wonders if, “we could not just skip the rest of this century…pass di-
rectly 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 per-
spective, the end of postmodernism coincides with its beginning, excluding
progression in the meantime. Yet postmodernism is not content with absti-
nence. 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 al-
ready established tools, exposes postmodernism’s confusion regarding tem-
poral progress. In the emergence of skepticism, a normative criterion is
established that makes a claim for epistemological renewal. Because post-
modernism 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.
Like postmodernism, Epicureanism was a philosophy of consolation.

Having conceded to the atomic and not divine structure of the cosmos, in re-
treating 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 subjec-
tivity 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 fan-
tasy 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 ab-
solute, 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-
tablished. Since it involves a privileging of the postmodernist subject, epis-

temologically, the concession to unity is conceptually inconsistent and ex-
plicitly 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 ac-
cusation against relativism—that it already implicates its own fixed posi-
tion—has undoubtedly been overused. Yet postmodernism has failed to
negotiate between destruction and creation without recourse to epistemologi-
cal 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 ten-
able 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 re-
spect, 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 post-
modernism embodies its eventual end. Only when this narrative has been
outlined will postmodernism’s implications become clear.
• C H A P T E R E I G H T •
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 ab-
solute 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 them-
selves 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 “eter-
nal 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 examina-
tion. 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 ex-
ample, 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 particu-
lar 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.
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 ultra-
revolutionary in 1794.
Under the guise of his Cult of Supreme Reason, later the Cult of Su-
preme Being, the Enlightenment’s notion of rational progress reaches its de-
structive 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 insepara-
ble—Robespierre’s Reign of Terror was grounded in an empty formalism in-
spired 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 gov-
ernment 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 des-
pot. 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.
•THE REVOLT OF REASON• 81
Among other places, we see such a transition in the predilection for land-
scape 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, dun-
geons from which the screams of martyrs would resound, water organs sere-
nading 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 aes-
thetic sensibility. Broadly speaking, a transition occurs in the nineteenth cen-
tury from reason to emotion, from the objective to the subjective, and from
the exterior to the interior. In musical terms, the dialectical struggle is mani-
fested initially in the tension between Mozart and Beethoven. The essential-
ity 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 Mo-
zart’s mature music. In Beethoven, the totality opens itself up to fragmented-
ness. 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 con-
cluded in Mahler, who marks the end of Romanticism. In Mahler, the con-
tentment 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 confla-
tion of tonality and tonal ambiguity was exploited by Mahler to the extent
that Romanticism only becomes possible in terms of what it now negates.
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 es-
tablished before it disbands. Speaking of this final dissolution and its subse-
quent transition into Serialism, Wilfrid Mellers writes, “The chord on which
the ‘Farewell’ finally fades into nothingness is a ‘verticalization’ of the pen-
tatonic 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, ex-
presses an impossible nostalgia. The nostalgia collapses as Nietzsche’s allu-
sions 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 pro-
vided chromatically, in terms of rows and series of music, which are then
juxtaposed against one another. Because Serialism lacks an absolute, cer-
tainty in resolution is not a potential mode of discourse. The connection be-
tween 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 inher-
ently 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 (Ca-
mus, 1942, p. 18).
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 dis-
cover their existence. In effect, essence is made in the course of existence. At
the same time, this construction might also be subtracted, voluntarily or oth-
erwise. In the face of this “radical freedom,” revolt against the contingent be-
comes 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 un-
derstanding of the world in which the self is the guarantor of truth. The rais-
ing 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 Existen-
tialism recognizes the contingency of being, so it covertly prepares the
groundwork for its necessity. In his essay on Beckett, Adorno notes this ten-
dency 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, postmodern-
ism took advantage of the bleak concessions of post-war modernity and Exis-
tentialism by rendering uncertainty central. With the possible exception of
Habermas, the promise of a Hegelian reconciliation (Versöhnung) is coun-
tered 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 parody-
ing, pastiching, and ironically distorting the past.
II
The preceding account of concepts does not claim to be a genealogical analy-
sis that situates intellectual history in causal terms. Instead, my intention has
been to show, by way of historical examples, how rationality has informed
modes of artistic and intellectual engagement. My account remains deliber-

ately 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 ra-
tionality 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 dis-
banding. With the desire intact, the failure to configure rationality in a post-
rational 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 rea-
son 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 con-
structed, often perniciously.
That communism should form the final stage in history as liberal democ-
racy should is just as rational. In both cases, we encounter an aspiration to-
ward 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 des-
potism. The question of progress emerges when we realize that a rational ac-
count 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. Be-
cause decline has been mythologized as a negating, suppressing, and debas-
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 pro-
gress will finally fulfill its fate. Always the resolution of fragments is de-
ferred. 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 predi-
cates itself on the principal of linearity and temporal reconstitution. Restora-
tion, 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 illu-
sive. Can we aspire toward illusion if that illusion is already known in ad-
vance? 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 provi-
dence and theodicy soon emerge. In the collision between reason and de-
struction, 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 pro-
gress, 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 de-
cline and vice to formal abstraction. By being open to decline, reason is dis-
puted and a critique of progress made possible.
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 ful-
fillment 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 nine-
teenth century, this fervor for the progressive, which would amount to a slow
secularization of history, reached a peak. Auguste Comte, the father of Posi-
tivism, 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 in-
somuch 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, de-
cline 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 hu-
mor, as though to suggest that such credulous aspirations have been sup-
planted 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 politi-
cal life. After the decline of Christianity, resisted only by a minority, spiritual
contortion and self-deception become essential as faith strives to preserve it-
self. In general, the greater this contortion becomes, the higher the march of
reason ascends. That Christianity has become marginalized, resorting to justi-
fying its presence as a social function, confirms its ineptitude and logical ob-
solescence.
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-
transfiguration of the same ideal, albeit in a different costume. Handed from

puppet to puppeteer, the distinction between concepts appears indistinguish-
able. Each age presents itself as more advanced than the former, since it ap-
pears 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 for-
mality, the illusion presents a system completely devoid of superfluity and
expressionism. What had preceded Positivism ceased to be valid. What re-
mained was the abstracted form, cold and sterile.
Ideally, we seek to arrive at a present whereby becoming has finally be-
come being, where the formless has been formed. For us, this is where pro-
gress 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, gath-
ering the past as it unites history. Unlike history as “site” (a term which is vi-
tal for both time and place), Jetztzeit maintains a mystical quality which
breaches formal time measured in segments. Instead, it introduces us to Ben-
jamin’s oracular notion of “Messianic time [which] comprises the entire his-
tory 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 sup-
poses history to be static, the task of redeeming the past is dynamic and con-
tingent: “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 de-
scription 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 star-
ing, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of
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 be-
fore 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 sec-
tions of the Theses, outmodes historicism’s concern with causality by “estab-
lishing 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 tele-
ology, 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 “ca-
cophonous” quality, “as if its Now were the Now…the Now for whose pro-
duction 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
the Now is my time, a consoling thought which assuages the struggle of his-
tory 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 pre-
sent. 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 cease-
lessly 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 im-
pression of rational progress. In Cioran’s reading of the “Golden Age,” time
gathers the past rather than dispersing it. Because of this gathering, the ho-
mogenizing 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 in-
evitable and the continuity of time is protracted, but not fixed. Demytholo-
gizing 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 persis-
tence 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.
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 as-
suaged 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 aesthet-
ics, 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 re-
mark 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 in-
fluences. 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 ra-
tionality and its absence easily defined. Instead, the coda bears witness to a
re-emergence of previous modes of thought gradually surging and withdraw-
ing. 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 ambigu-
ous seeping of rationality into what we might term post-rational thought, the
sudden seizure of that previous thought is identifiable in abstraction. Phi-
losophy, it was stated in the preface to this book, has been reluctant to ad-
dress the “postmemory” of an absent past which still persists and determines
the present. Dwelling in that present, so long as the residue of history re-
mains unexamined, becomes stifled as old methods are still adhered to. Re-
addressing the (im)balance between the past and the present would therefore
require an active engagement with what exists on the other side of the tempo-
ral end. In that exploration, distance from the past is acquired and the contin-
ued presence of reason able to be measured.
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 de-
cline 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 dissolu-
tion. 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

• C H A P T E R N I N E •
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 Melancho-
lia, 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 them-
selves 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 disso-
lution.
The protracted decline of the West, originally determined by Oswald
Spengler a hundred years ago, continues unabated today because the imbal-
ance 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 im-
age 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 en-
gaged 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.
In submitting to the possibility of motionlessness, reason gives way to

the après nous le déluge of silence and nothingness. Recall that the emer-
gence of silence is dependent upon the antecedent violence that determines
its being. Silence is the lingering aftermath of violence, the protracted reso-
nance 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 de-
cline 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 spa-
tial dynamic stasis, imbued with a false aspiration toward the absolute, re-
mains 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 for-
merly 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 pre-
figured the present temporal context. Values no longer cohered. At once,
progress meant the giving away of old forms, allowing the structure of a par-
ticular 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 de-
fining 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 geneal-
ogy 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-
•A SHORT HISTORY OF DECAY• 97
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 im-
material. By dint of aesthetic appreciation, the physical manifestation of de-
cline, 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 corre-
spondence 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 fu-
ture of rationality. How these two aspects manage to correspond will be ex-
plicated in turn.
II
Though the manifestation of decay has been suppressed and celebrated ac-
cording 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 muta-
bility 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 Meso-
potamians 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 Eu-
phrates. 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
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 ances-
tor 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, Gil-
gamesh 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 sur-
prise. 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 superior-
ity of immutable Forms, so securing the conceptual framework for experi-
ence. Even in Empedocles, we find decay disparaged. In his work,
Purifications, Empedocles writes of a biblical Fall, whereby punishment is
mortality. With the exception of Heraclitus, for whom the becoming of proc-
ess entails an affirmation of both growth and decay, this would be the preva-
lent 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 fa-
ther…everything slowly decays, marching toward the tomb, exhausted by the an-
cient 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 de-

cay 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 pro-
gress. 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 en-
abled decay to become aesthetic. Had the Romans been concealing the aes-
thetic aspect of decay? Or, having nothing but wealth to lose, was indulgence
a compensation for ruin? The temporal conditions under which decay be-
comes 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.
In Delacroix’s “The Death of Sardanapalus” 1827–1828 (Fig. 1), the dy-

namic 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 counte-
nance 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-
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 vir-
tues 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 his-
tory 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 Baudril-

lard’s diagnosis of modern history by reintroducing the view of decay as in-
sidious. 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 un-
restored 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 illus-
trations 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 advanc-
ing further…” (St. Gregory, 1952, p. 48). With this dogma established, the
image of the self as a vehicle to transport the soul to the other world is con-
ceived. 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 in-
terdependence 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 conse-
quences 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 Renais-
sance’s rediscovery of Rome, in the seventeenth century.
Thrown by Copernicus into a cosmology of negation, the onus upon mu-
tability, decay, and process was at the center of seventeenth century thought.
Cosmological volatility stirred in consciousness profound disquiet and in-
tense melancholy. The newfound flux of the world undermined previous cer-
tainties 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 en-
tered 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 even-
tual 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:
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 muta-
bility 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 sta-
sis” (Dollimore, 1999, p. 74). Stasis establishes a center, a space from which
the erosion of things can be viewed. Because the preserved margin of aes-
thetic 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, Cit-
ies, Men. And all these are Concentric; the common center to them all is decay, ru-
in….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
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 effec-
tive passage is the enclosed “boxes” of nature, hitherto delimited and domes-
ticated 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 re-
discovery of Rome. When painters such as Monsu F. Desiderio and the Ital-
ian 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 support-
ing his head. Rosa’s painting concludes in an impasse of wisdom. The tran-
quil 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 pi-

ous 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” en-
tailed 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).
Figure 2: Salvator Rosa, “Democritus in Meditation,” 1650.

Courtesy of Statens Museum for Kunst.
In the gardens of Europe, artificial ruins, engineered by aesthetes to imi-

tate 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 mortal-
ity 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 view-
ing Gandy’s painting as an idealized image, the early nineteenth century aes-
thetic reveals itself as a continuation of the aristocratic penchant for artificial
ruins. Because of this mode of aestheticization within aesthetic contempla-
tion, the ruin remained fractional to the subject and so limited itself to “pic-
turesque decay.” “I love above all,” writes Flaubert in a familiar passage,
“the sight of vegetation resting upon old ruins; this embrace of nature, com-
ing 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 in-
creases. 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).
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 be-
ing 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 Frie-
drich 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 po-
larities: 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, Frie-
drich’s ruin symbolizes time coming undone.
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 sub-
jective mind. Despite Friedrich’s Protestantism, the simplistic view associ-
ated with the Christian perspective on decay was repugnant for the painter.
Decay, dissolution, and decline, more than moralistic fables, enabled the pos-
sibility 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
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 al-
lusion 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 de-
piction 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 chal-
lenged as subjectivity determines the status of the ruin. For the Romantics, a
radical distinction between the object of decay and the excluded subject per-
sisted 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 con-
struct 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 ex-
pounding 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 pa-
tience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and sky-
scrapers…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 Fontaine-
bleau 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 ar-
tifice 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 in-
evitable. Thereafter, industry transpires as an object of affirmation which in-
verts the Romantic concern with nature.
The brave new world, shining deceptively toward the end of the nine-
teenth century, alight with the failed promises of reason and technology, sig-
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 mov-
ing 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 pur-
pose 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 fig-
ures, 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 ma-
turity 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 con-
verting 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-
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 post-
Baudelairean writers gradually pledging their affirmation to decadence. Con-
sider 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 Em-
pire…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 be-

comes 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 fal-
ling 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 re-

newed 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 ex-
clude 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.
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 trans-
formed 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 experi-
ences 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 “neces-
sary color within such a superfluity of light” (Ibid., p. 176). Decline gives
richness to life and renders the inanimate animate. The alchemical transfor-
mation 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
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 po-
lemic Degeneration. For Nordau, an optimistic Darwinian, degeneration was
a morbid deviation from a normative mode of predetermined order, as out-
lined by the natural sciences. This, in turn, would translate as a dogmatic ad-
herence 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 allu-
sive thus become degenerative par excellence. Coupled with this social diag-
nosis, 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 ques-
tion. 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 po-
sition of the teeth...webbed or supernumerary fingers” (Ibid., p. 17). Dismiss-
ing 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 at-
tack, 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).
After deriding Baudelaire, Nordau proceeds to exhort him, quoting his

poetry at length while simultaneously identifying what is degenerate. Baude-
laire’s repulsion of nature, fervor for the diseased and deformed, and yearn-
ing 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 under-
standing, perversion is a deviation from a normative status evident in natural
law. In relation to Baudelaire, this correlation is erroneous. Baudelaire’s pes-
simism 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 pro-
gress. 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 de-
nounced 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, ra-
tional 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 ra-
tionalism. 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 in-
tolerable, nostalgic, and regressive pursuit of the pernicious “ideal.” Replac-
ing 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 chal-
lenges linearity and rationality. As with the eighteenth century Italian phi-
losopher Giambattista Vico, Spengler’s account of history does not adhere to
a process of gradual evolution whereby subsequent epochs or forms (Gestalt)
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 ave-

nue 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 European-
Western. Each culture carries a distinct “prime symbol” which serves as the
focus of that culture. The Faustian Soul, being the prime symbol of the Euro-
pean-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 arri-
val 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 Indus-
trial 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 invit-
ing 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 op-
timism 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.
IV
Out of this dialectical synthesis between Nordau and Spengler, the contem-
porary 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 histori-
cal 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 subjectiv-
ism 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 sub-
ject is attained as a homogenous impression of individuality is put forward.
Under the aegis of the New Age, the human being becomes collectively iden-
tified with an already fixed image of individualism. Because of this renuncia-
tion of autonomy, carried out in the New Age “cult,” the non-self is
obliterated. As a result, New Age thinking is destructive to progressive de-
cline 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 de-
tached 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 un-
critical opposition by habit. Speaking about New York, Baudrillard is in-
sightful: “It is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility,
indifference, puritanism, and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technologi-
cal 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).
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 “civi-
lized,” democratic nations is logical and repeated in the model of science. By
explaining the casual factors determining how culture has fallen, science ex-
ceeds 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, how-
ever, 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 clo-
sure, a sense of the indeterminate emerges. If Spengler was right to diagnose
the twentieth century as the age of Caesarism, then the epilogue continues
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 estab-
lishing 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 aes-
thetics of decay in greater detail.
• C H A P T E R T E N •
An Uncanny Place: Modern Ruins
Nothing is miserable unless it has feelings. A ruined house is not; man alone is mis-
erable.
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 ex-
penditure. Knowing that a culture is in decline, we find an increase in con-
sumerism. 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 ab-
stracto; 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 con-
sumerism determined by proximity to ruin. After the fall, compensation, it-
self a vulgar and arbitrary concept, manifests itself as the desire to plunder
the remains of grandeur. In contrast, the nineteenth century predilection to-
ward aesthetic pessimism excluded any consideration of compensation,
Nietzsche’s Dionysian revelry the logical outcome of this aesthetic move-
ment. 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 expan-
sion 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
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 cen-
tury, 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 suc-
cess. Instead of demonstrating economic growth in terms of spatial occu-
pancy, the capitalist logic now demonstrates it in abstraction. As capital
develops, the sites of previous activity, unable to exploit the profit of capital-
ism, 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 aban-
doned, 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 re-
dundant function or otherwise decommissioned, consigning them to the use-
less. 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 build-
ings: “Dereliction—so closely associated with the nineteenth century indus-
trial revolution—is actually increasing during our century of technological
revolution” (Barr, 1969, p. 13). Barr’s prognosis was correct, his book pro-
phetic. For Barr, despite the twentieth century’s “change of heart” with re-
gard 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 dere-
liction and does not, we discover, appreciate the grandiose sight of a “splen-
did 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 es-
tablished there, and dereliction also discourages other modern industries from com-
•AN UNCANNY PLACE• 121
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 war-

ranted. Structural dereliction has grown in accordance with capitalist produc-
tion, 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 un-
dermined 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 re-
working of space in which disorder and mutability are suppressed. Here, we
pass from a consideration of political motivation to one concerning the phe-
nomenology 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 de-
fines our temporal dwelling, and so our continuous identity. Hence, dis-
placement 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” (Ca-
sey, 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 “soma-
tocentric perspective” in which place and the body align (Casey, 1997, p.
237). Against a “space prejudiced” framework, Casey puts forward an ac-
count of “the power of place” which seeks to reclaim the centrality of place.
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. Place-
names withdraw a space from abstraction by situating it in a particular con-
text. The “zones” demarcating militarized areas, themselves anti-places, un-
dergo 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 rein-
statement of space is thus synonymous with renewal and victory. The re-
newal 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 be-
comes possible. Thus, an attachment to this hope is conceived by those ex-
iled 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 move-
ment, we become entangled with an unreal place, solipsistically preserved by
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 mourn-
ing. 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 con-
tinues to exist where we are. The logic of melancholy, ancient and unyield-
ing, 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 crea-
tion 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. In-
stead, 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 origi-
nal 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 dimension-
ality of place, coupled with its distinct features, means that place is memora-
ble 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. In-
stead, we are confronted with a homogenous and exposed anti-place config-
ured in terms of “cartographic representations” (Ibid., p. 185). The presence
of site is not spatially limited to a “zone,” but “triumphing” over place.
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 com-
merce. 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 de-
fines 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 spatial-
ity 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. Mul-
tinationalism, 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 at-
tached to the center of place is impossible while the reconfiguration of future
space is prioritized. Units, terminals, and other placeless zones create a uni-
formity that enforces the presentation of progress despite the essentially vola-
tile undercurrent of capitalism. In conjunction with the impermanence of
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 de-
limiting 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 tem-
porally 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 order-
ing 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 tempo-
rally by information technology, exceeds enclosed space by constituting the
ordered matrix of the urban landscape. Thus, we turn to the city as site, ho-
mogenous 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. Describ-
ing 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 repeti-
tive 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
becomes tenable when such a space is employed as an instrument of en-

forcement. 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 place-
less space, which stifles experience. The facelessness of the city is literally
(dis)embodied in that communication no longer relies on face-to-face interac-
tion. 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 ra-
tional 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, Vi-
rilio’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, flour-
ish. 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 post-
industrial 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 re-
cent 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 be-
came concrete as vaultings above significant inner-spaces, structural antici-
pations respectively of the mathematic of algebra and that of analysis”

(Spengler, 2000, p. 128). Numerical abstraction, as Spengler reminds us, en-
forces a necessity which technology is instrumental in creating. The creation
of an unreal space beyond the realms of the earth is also recognized in Vi-
rilio’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 post-
industrial societies…” (Virilio, 1997, p. 388).
III
Despite the subversion of platial boundaries by the city-site, a polarity per-
sists between above and below, far and near, and here and there. The city-site
is in flight, defensive against intrusion, and vigilant over particularity. Bache-
lard’s Jungian analysis of the psychological dimensions of the house insight-
fully 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 “rational-
ized”….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 form-
lessness. Thus, fictional horror, but also psychological horror, compels con-
sciousness toward a fixed image. Reason ties down the unformed by
superimposing an existing image upon it. The cellar becomes a place as ob-
jects 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
wayside, and so from the scope of “progress,” modern ruins undo what capi-
talism 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 thresh-
old 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 place-
world. 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 dis-
tinction between the organic and the synthetic. As we have seen in Virilio’s
“overexposed city,” atemporal spatiality dissuades the emergence of the par-
ticular. In concrete terms, the particular counters regulated and ordered
space. As a result, a margin is created on the border of space in which par-
ticular 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 an-
tecedent 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 restrain-
ing that civilized, settled human existence brings in its train” (Ibid., p. 188).
Outside of civilization, the place of wilderness brings us into an “eerie” terri-
tory, 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
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 other-
worldly.
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 civiliza-
tion. 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 exist-
ing 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 dis-
junction between desolation and civility, each aspect becomes wholly de-
fined 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
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 per-
sisted. The spectral mirage of the past makes a sudden appearance before
withdrawing. What I have the termed “the Nothing,” comes about as spatial-
temporal 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 be-
longs 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 rec-
ognizing the other place as native from where we are displaced. Our dis-
placement thus coincides with an ordered distinction, still maintained. In the
modern ruin, the sense of unfamiliarity, uncanniness, and bewilderment con-
verges. What we are displaced from is the burgeoning idea that rational space
is central and native to our dwelling. The consummation of displacement tes-
tifies 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 land-
scape. 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, regu-
lating the ruin becomes thwarted as the temporal velocity of decay intensi-
fies. The decay quickens the more the ruin becomes exposed. Thus, while the
erosion of the structure appears slow at first, emitting the impression of dura-
bility, 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 fa-
miliarity 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
surface. In the ruined factory, old machines, rusty and fragmented, indis-
criminately 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 persis-
tence of substantiality. The ruin is not the same as its previous (active) incar-
nation. 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 bounda-
ries 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. Gener-
ally, 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 re-
mains: 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 dis-
proves outright extinction, so compels an unexpected return.
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 lin-
gers in the aftermath of motion. Only now, broken, fragmented, and divorced
from its owner, the machine belongs nowhere. Small and apparently insig-
nificant 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
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 subvert-
ing 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 re-
inforces 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 pre-
sent. 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 disjointed-
ness. Thus, even the untimely present can become domesticated. The domes-
tication 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 fu-
ture 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.
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 judg-
ment, 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 tempo-

rally by fixing the continuity of identity. Nietzsche’s city rambler sees and
attaches himself to the material of space, discovering in each nook and bor-
der an element of his previous self, now wedged into the landscape. The re-
assuring aspect concerning the spatial containment of memory, its
persistence, is accomplished at the expense of producing a static representa-
tion of the past. “Here we lived...here we shall live.” With this confession,
the suppression of contingent place is enforced. Moving away from the wil-
derness 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 be-
cause its foundations are being swept away. The return to old place is a con-
firmation 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 simultane-
ously 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 dis-
turbs 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 experi-
ence 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 displace-
ment, we see ourselves as specters of the future, not yet “there” but already
sensed.
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 am-
biguous 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. Der-
rida 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 op-
poses 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 commenta-
tors 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 al-
ways constituted through the difference and deferral of the past, as well as
anticipations of the future” (Buse and Scott, 1999, pp. 10–11). The conver-
gence 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).
Applying Derrida’s notion of hauntology to the place of ruin, it becomes

possible to reconfigure the border between space and place, order and disor-
der, 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 “mu-
tating.” 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 mar-
ginalizing 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. Me-
diating 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 re-
newed strength as it veers toward an uncertain and protracted end, thus mir-
rors, 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 re-
lationship in which neither surface nor interior are autonomous. In their con-
junction, 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 antici-
pated, 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 self-
recognition. “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-
terpart. We are in the realm of the Nothing, haunted by the memory of an un-
dispersed 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 an-
ticipated fifty years ago suggests that the exhaustion of rationality and indus-
trialism 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 sensi-
tivity to the ruin, her position inspires opposition. The ruin as an artifact
counters its original implementation as an instrument that serves an end. Be-
cause of this fall from utility, associations of waste are prevalent. From phe-
nomenology, 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, origi-
nally exploited by Marcel Duchamp, now reduced to a cliché. The logic of
utility, however, compels that the use of an object is exhausted upon concep-
tion. Use is useful only as it tends toward a particular end determined by a
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 al-
tered 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 previ-
ous context, the unhomely landscape adopts it. Thereafter, the division be-
tween 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 justifica-
tion other than direct experience. Stripped of its contingency, its particular
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 Nine-
veh 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 an-
cient 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.
• C H A P T E R E L E V E N •
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 re-
mains 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 half-
lit churches have been rendered fertile soil. Ninfa is only protracted in its de-
cline. 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 pre-
served 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-
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 ru-
inous 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 ex-
perience 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 Kos-
ovo, Pristina is a city torn by war. During the final years of the twentieth cen-
tury, 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 re-
populated. 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 differ-
ent visual landscape. While a causal replication exists in that both are places
of desertion, catalyzed by the threat of impending war, the expression of ru-
ination 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 demol-
ished 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 our-
selves can feel superior. The ruin is too close; it brims down too intensely.
Confronted with this absence of temporal detachment, a sense of disquiet
•THE POST-INDUSTRIAL SUBLIME• 143
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 repli-
cated in both places. In the village of Ninfa, we might question the aesthetic
experience on account of it being sterilized through preservation. The es-
sence of ruination, we might add, has been reduced to a sense of the pictur-
esque 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 rea-
sonable 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 ru-
ined 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 pre-
sent 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 out-
ward 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.
In the Roman Theater, arched walls soften the wind while dense sand ab-
sorbs the light. Further left, half-lit shadows seep in from the pillared col-
umns. 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 preser-
vation 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 thea-
ters 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 frag-
mented. The insistence that function once resided is a claim that is uncon-
vincing, despite historical fact suggesting otherwise. Often, the impending
gravity of a ruin, its being-in-place, can negate the belief that it was other-
wise, 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 si-
multaneously 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 trans-
formed to a palace in the sixteenth century, its contemporary conservation
means that the active quality of the ruin is wholly embodied. Verging on col-
lapse 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 polar-
ized proximity between the temporally distant and the familiar. We are grate-
ful 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 be-
come aware of the ruin’s fragmentation and in turn its power too (Fig. 8).
Figure 8: Theater of Marcellus. Courtesy of Andrew Wickham.
Along with Ninfa, aesthetic detachment is gained in the Theater of Mar-

cellus, 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, mean-
while, means that unity is gained in the space—for we are no longer unambi-
guously 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 sov-
ereign to formlessness.
Detroit, Michigan, once regarded as the modern city par excellence, to-
day is the poorest city in the United States, buckling under economic depres-
sion 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
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 Cen-
tral 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 pil-
lars, and a shattered mosaic create an imposing impression. Covered in graf-
fiti, with wiry shrubs emerging from beneath the floor, the space has been
transformed into a greenhouse of industrialized vegetation. As the stone ve-
neer 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 lit-
tered 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 mod-
ern 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 aes-
thetic idea. In the ancient ruin, passivity might well preclude our sustained
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 be-
cause 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 incorpo-
rated and nullified by the rational project. What originally sought to over-
power 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 de-
fined the beautiful and the sublime historically. With the Greek philosopher
Longinus, the sublime as an aesthetic category emerges. In his On the Sub-
lime, 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 be-
tween 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 ren-
dered 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 sub-
lime is the experience of reason turning the terrifying object into a compre-
hended 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-
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 de-
rived 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 formless-
ness 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 rea-
son. If the enforcement of reason by way of detached (formal) contemplation
gives way to aesthetic pleasure, then in reason’s inverted formulation, form-
lessness triumphs, not reason. In the ruin, the aspirations of order and perma-
nence 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 aban-
doned 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 him-
self 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 sub-
lime is not the halo of ascent but the flickering resonance of descent and
gravity. The post-industrial sublime does not invite the transcendental possi-
bility of “a pre-eminence above nature that is the foundation of self-
preservation,” 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).
Figure 9: Power Station. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

In the absence of reason, the conceited detachment of the Romantic sub-

lime 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 classi-
cal 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 re-
pressed. So long as space remains closed to absence, preferring to fill the dis-
rupted 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 affirm-
ing, since it reveals a place capable of critical resistance against the enforce-
ment of spatial rationality.
IV
That beauty is a concept largely contested in contemporary art is an indica-
tion that the order of rationality has lost its influence. When beauty does per-
sist, 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 op-
portunity for aesthetics to startle us. Without this unnerving presence, the
ruin fails to create a place of resistance in which prolonged active engage-
ment is possible. In effect, we become removed from the ruin, because it re-
moves 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 con-
ferred 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 aesthet-
ics, we will have to venture to the place in which rationality violently dis-
joins 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 spa-
tial 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 deca-
dence, squalor, and pomp, the pier formed a ceremonial centerpiece that be-
came 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).
Figure 10: The West Pier, Brighton. Image by author.

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 essen-
tial 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 indi-
viduated itself as the empty canvas self-consciously disbanded. Shards of
complicated steel, once an arrangement of meticulous proportion, fell be-
neath 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 be-
coming of time and the future of time were indissoluble. As the pier smol-
dered, 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 ex-
ceeded 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 it-
self. Unable to express a final consent, the frame manifests itself as a lacuna
on the seascape. Thereafter, its sublimity drowns along with the scalded frag-
ments entrenched in the seabed.
• C H A P T E R T W E L V E •
The Phenomenology of the Alleyway
Everything is on the point of decline, and only the weeds flourish: bindweed stran-
gles 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 ru-
inous, 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 distinguish-
ing features and determined by extinction, not an aesthetic momentum of be-
coming-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 in-
tensity 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
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 ob-
ject 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 dis-
carded 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 causal-
ity 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 be-
come disorientated from their habit and habitat. The urge for sensory en-
gagement 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 experien-
tial 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. Like-
wise, 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
•THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF ALLEYWAY• 157
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 func-
tional, 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 frag-
mented backdrop. For civil life, this is the appropriate place for social disor-
der. 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 degenera-
tion and dissipation, and so the bond between the licentious and the detritic is
disclosed. The charm of the alleyway exceeds aesthetic merits by its becom-
ing a sanctum sanctorum for the salacious. Enclosed walls and the surging
and withdrawing of passing activity mean that the alleyway attracts pruri-
ence. The cat too, with its docile temperament, reinforces the twilight hour of
licentious place by roaming that place stealthily. Yet the cat is seldom immo-
bile. 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 film-
maker 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 vegeta-
tion. 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 Ren-
aissance 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 ca-
nals 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 sym-
bolic 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
himself, we know he is referring to the word in both its pejorative and its ru-
inous 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 ab-
sence of order and convention, and the insertion of decay and humidity, con-
tribute 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 al-
leyway despite being further from sound.
The undoing of urban space in the alleyway means that it establishes it-
self 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 alley-
way counters consistency by being indeterminate. Hence, time falls from its
designated position and warrants a new mode of engagement, namely the re-
flective. The aesthetic aspect of the alleyway, its unification of the frag-
mented 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 alley-
way 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 ne-
gate 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 nine-
teenth century impression of “picturesque decay.” With the apartment stoop,
a place of transience and repose, the sentiments of intimacy and entropy
combine. By joining the private home with the public street, the stoop occu-
pies an indefinite terrain, whereby reverie is secured by a tacit boundary. Be-
ing-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 posi-
tion, 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 plat-
form 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 exhaus-
tion warrants a new life. In itself, the negation of use does not justify aes-
thetic 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 dwell-
ing 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. Lack-
ing the space in which limits can be defined, temporal continuity dissolves.
When a dwelling lacks enclosure, we forsake the possibility of becoming at-
tached to that place, since we do not belong to it. Not belonging to any given
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 mo-
tionlessness 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. Bache-
lard writes, “All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of
home” (Bachelard, 1994, p.5). Inhabiting the departure lounge, there is al-
ways 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, how-
ever, 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. Like-
wise, 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 radi-
ance as our memories are reduced to still life. The delayed time between de-
parture 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
and travel in foreign directions. Adhering to an implicit logic, which ascribes

substance to materiality, the spirit of things grows undiminished. In the re-
turn 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. Assur-
ance 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 nega-
tion 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 be-
tween inside and outside so that dwelling alongside decay is aesthetic. This
spatial interplay is incomplete because ruins tend toward a complete disinte-
gration 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 rela-
tionship 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 mu-
tuality, 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 non-
home. That is, between that which secures intimacy and that which threatens
to undermine intimacy. Thus, if inside and outside form a “dialectics of divi-
sion,” examining this tension in concrete terms will clarify its implications.
In the first instance, the central feature of the intimate place is to shelter day-
dreaming, to provide a space of dwelling in which “fixations of happiness”
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 un-
hinge 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, disrup-
tion, and unpredictably is greater. With the context of dwelling, unpredict-
ability 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 vio-
lated. 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 se-
ductiveness and its ability to propel the imagination into “the space of else-
where.” 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 shel-
ter.
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
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 “des-
perate 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 inside-
outside’ 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 ten-
sion with the outside, when this mutual tension gives way to the “horrible in-
side-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 non-
home leaves Bachelard’s shelter unprotected and so vulnerable to the disrup-
tion 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 in-
stead broach the non-home if dwelling is to resist the insidious connotations
of the “homeland.” For Bachelard, however, until being is enclosed by iden-
tifying itself with what opposes the home, it remains susceptible to the void
of uncertainty: a void undoubtedly endangered as the stoop rises to the stair-
case.
• C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N •
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 re-
veals 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 medita-
tion. 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 over-
turned. A similar instruction appears in William Blake. In his etching “The
Gates of Paradise” (1793), we find Blake crystallizing this striving by depict-
ing the struggle to fulfill ascent as a passionate yearning. Similarly, in
“Jacob’s Ladder” (1800), Blake depicts the celestial ascent as a medium be-
tween the divine and humane, the ladder itself emerging as the transmuting
agent between human being and God. Notably, Blake was keen to align the
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 momen-
tum 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 en-
closed exposure, the stoop encouraged a retreat from temporality. With the
stairwell, inclusion and exclusion coincide. Ascent and descent remain op-
posed and mutually exclusive. Alchemically, the staircase provides a sym-
bolic bond between microcosm and macrocosm. Divinity and humanity
collide, and thus merge. Phenomenologically, let us bracket this bond by em-
placing 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 theosophi-
cal 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 memo-
rable, 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 Surre-
alism 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 hun-
dred 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
•AESTHETIC REVULSION• 167
knowledge is attained. The epistemological dimension of the staircase reap-

pears in everyday spaces apparently devoid of significance. The hill and
mountaintop are obvious cases in which we journey to a definite peak in or-
der to survey the ground beneath. The pleasure involved in the ascent is aes-
thetic 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 eve-
ryday 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 passer-
by. 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 as-
cent 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
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 arrang-
ing 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 in-
ternal and existential dynamic in the process. Our findings have resulted in
the conjunction between epistemological enlightenment and aesthetic pleas-
ure. 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 con-
clusion 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 as-
pect 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, al-
ready fissured and in danger of giving way, the struggle risks exhaustion. Yet
correlating repulsion with truncation should be suspended until we have im-
mersed 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 ra-
tionality and the experience of ruin.
Let us firstly direct our attention to the aspect of linearity which rational-
ity 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 fin-
gers” (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 vio-
lation, Bernard Tschumi writes: “Steep and dangerous stairs, those corridors
consciously made too narrow for crowds, introduce a radical shift from archi-
tecture as an object of contemplation to architecture as a perverse instru-
ment…” (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 cor-
relates 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 subver-
sions 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 pre-
carious 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
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 con-
nected 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, ruina-

tion incites, as Bataille correctly observes, an instinct more primordial. Aes-
thetics does not, therefore, guarantee recognition of the importance of falling.
Yet the figure of the staircase becoming an object of terror is central to liter-
ary 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 stair-
case?
Reprising our meditation on the ruined staircase, what emerges is the ap-
parent 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 possibil-
ity of ascent; in the deficiency, however, the desire to dissolve affirmatively
remains intact. Now, ascendancy progresses toward decline, not ascent. As
the rungs on the ladder break, cultivation toward ontological decline is estab-
lished.
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 op-
poses and enters into a struggle with Eros, the libidinal instinct. Freud’s cor-
relation 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 mat-
ter (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 impos-
sible instinct that can only find release by sublimating itself. Yet “the phe-
nomena 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 re-
pressed, however, as civilization “obtains mastery over the individual’s dan-
gerous 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 war-
rants 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-
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 weather-
ing 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 con-
sciousness takes place whereby disorientation takes precedence over pleas-
ure.
Between sublimity and the dissolute, we discover the aesthetics of revul-
sion, 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 ero-
sion and dwelling is obtained. With the staircase, repose is crushed, since a
decayed staircase is fragmented and therefore spatially abstract. Neither be-
longing 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.
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 ex-
ternal 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 be-
cause it overruns between spaces, overlapping from one spatial form to an-
other, 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 incit-
ing a reaction in the subject, rust declares its value.
Visually, the visceral aspect of rust, its supple, flaking, almost erotic un-
dercurrent, 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 per-
spective on time which struggles toward domestication, and so falsity. Con-
sidering 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 reassur-
ing 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 re-
gret to know that this is what the structure has become. The ruin, meanwhile,
places itself in a space in which distance coincides with resignation. Ruina-
tion does reclaim nature. But rust is neither reclaimed nor extinguished; thus,
it lingers in a halfway house between sublimity and the dissolute (Fig. 12).
Figure 12: Steel Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

We have seen in the case of Brighton’s charred West Pier how an ex-
tremity 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 al-
ters 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 pro-
vides 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 na-
ture’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 build-
ings….Add to this disease-engendering atmosphere, pollution by smoking, carbon
dioxide….food encapsulated and infiltrated by chemical fertilizers and sprays, con-
stantly damaging bodies and minds…radio-active fallout…continuous noise (Ibid.,
pp. 28–29).
Coupled with this destruction, Metzger notes the advancement of anti-

place “city centre sites [in which] more and more fine land will be covered
by low quality housing estates and motorways—to increase the turnover of

the building and engineering industries. To survive—capitalism must con-
tinue 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 disinte-
gration of the artwork, so instilling a bond between the two. This “mass ther-
apy,” 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 re-
port from The Times describes it thus:
Summoned by a green-tinted manifesto called Auto-destructive Art, a crowd assem-

bled 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 gas-
mask, he stepped forward, lifted up a spray gun and covered the sheets in hydrochlo-
ric 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 aes-
thetics of revulsion, a sentiment anticipated by J.K. Huysmans. For Grüne-
wald, 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.
Huysmans’s description of Grünewald’s “Crucifixion” (1523–24) is espe-

cially 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 perpetrat-
ing, and is a warning and an admonition to reverse this direction. By setting up
large-scale industrially-produced sculptures in a process of disintegration, auto-
destructive art, through the aesthetic of revulsion can lead to a rejection of many as-
pects 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 disinte-
gration, he reduces the process to a specific end. We ought not to be sur-
prised: politics tends to determine aesthetics in advance. The effect, however,
is a form of aesthetic experience that legitimizes itself with recourse to ac-
tion. As the political agenda disbands, so aesthetics loses its dynamism, often
prematurely. With his later work, Damaged Nature, the close relationship be-
tween aesthetics and politics converges through eco-pessimism. Yet the pes-
simism is duplicitous, since Metzger sets in place a restorative ethics. With
Metzger’s desire to restore the wounds of society, his position proves unten-
able.
In his favor, the methodology mirrors the negating affirmation character-
ized 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 dis-
cover rust falling into the same ethical position. Instead of phenomenologi-
cally bracketing the implications of rust before entering into a dialogue with
it, rust is employed to achieve a particular social aim, namely, moral enlight-
enment. Metzger rightly acknowledges that “corrosion is regarded as an en-
emy 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 revul-
sion” (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 ma-
nipulation is that auto-destructive art effaces its own ambitions by rendering
the ruin a novelty. From the present perspective, any such “mechanized” atti-
tude 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 secu-
rity. 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 as-
sert 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 corre-
sponding object of ruin, we hope to find a relationship that realizes the aes-
thetic fulfillment of the ruin. The name of this practice is urban exploration.
• C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N •
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 de-
sire to explore and celebrate such spaces. Urban exploration is the term em-
ployed 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 develop-
ment 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 sug-
gest how this bond between everyday place, active but prosaic, and decayed
place, inactive but resonant, emerges. For now, let us define urban explora-
tion 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 indus-
trial 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
Greece. Because of this temporal retreat, the Romantic aesthete was a posi-
tion 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 col-
lapse, 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, arti-
ficial 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 recon-
struction 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 imag-
ines 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 Chris-
topher Woodward writes in his pleasing In Ruins: “A ruin is a dialogue be-
tween 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 sug-
gesting the illusion of temporal depth and spatial distance over artifice and
pretence.
II
If the Romantic consciousness bore a similarity to urban exploration’s pro-
pensity toward a purely aesthetic contemplation of space, then the content of
the space is replicated, albeit partially, with the advent of industrial archae-
ology. 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 con-
tentious. A broadly accepted definition states:
•TRANSGRESSING PLACE• 181
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 re-
mains and ruins. As Palmer and Neaverson write, the development of indus-
trialism often resulted in displacement and poverty, evident in
“contradictions between the forces and the relations of production, i.e. be-
tween capitalist organizations utilizing new technology and the social organi-
zation 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 de-
contextualizing of space is consistent with a descriptive engagement with
space. Yet the mode of decontextualizing does not derive from a phenome-
nological 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, sta-
tistical analysis, photography: all become central in the attempt to render the
mutable past solid. The concern with preservation has often meant that a spe-
cific aspect of industrial history has been abstracted from its context. Be-
cause 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 dis-
tinct to the remains of the warehouse, namely, its process in time:
The essentials of any warehouse are safe storage with adequate facilities for receiv-
ing, 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, com-
bined with easy handling… (Raistrick, 1973, p. 152).
The factual formality of Raistrick’s account testifies to the demand to ar-

chive space without ever encountering it. History, especially European his-
tory, 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
such a desire has upon the original ruin or monument. Thus, the act of his-
toricizing 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 arche-
ology and Romanticism. Unlike industrial archaeology, for urban explora-
tion, 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 prac-
tice 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 be-
tween 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 tem-
poral present (Jullian, 1971, p. 115). Like Piranesi before them, the Symbol-
ists sought refuge in negating the present by turning to ruins. The resignation
to a temporal mode outside of the Symbolists’ own confirmed their often-
ironic decadence. The ruin, especially the artificial ruin, succeeded in ma-
nipulating time and space by creating a mythical and exotic image. In a con-
temporary 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 inter-
view 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 build-
ings…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
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 anti-
thetical 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 be-

ing exasperated. Inversely, a lack of threat does not compel a struggle. In-
stead, things remain as they are. Yet as rationality is disrupted by decline, the
aestheticizing of that decline ensues, so establishing the decadent conscious-
ness, a trait evident in urban exploration and Romanticism. Because of this
temporal proximity between culture and aesthetics, the ruin is able to be ele-
vated from its initial disregard. The strangeness of treating present ruins aes-
thetically 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 in-
tended destruction, compelling an ethical aspect which morally implicates
the viewer in the present. The rationality of the war-torn city, though abhor-
rent, nevertheless expects closure. The war-ruin has a purpose in that its de-
struction supposedly justifies an end. Overseeing the fallout of war, in con-
tradistinction 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 disso-
ciate 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 aes-
thetical 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 cau-
sality 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 de-
struction, 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 objec-
tive 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 aes-
thetically. How can we explain such a relationship? The overseeing of ruins
in the present entails an aspect of voyeurism in which the hidden infrastruc-
ture 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 attrac-
tion of exploring the still active site is undoubtedly due to the power it be-
stows 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 know-
ing what others have yet to grasp. The founder of urban exploration main-
tains 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:
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 syn-

onymous 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 ar-
chitecture and design. Certainly going exploring is a good way to get people inti-
mate 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 ex-
ploration distinguishes itself from postmodernist subversion by grounding its
identity through assertion and not negation. Instead of employing a drive to-
ward the destruction of a given set of claims, urban exploration tacitly chal-
lenges 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 pro-
gress and movement. Nietzsche again writes insightfully: “Let us not be de-
ceived! 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 tempo-
ral categories means that linear progress loses its power of persuasion. We
are confronted with an ambiguous space. Time has ceased, yet simultane-
ously attracts the impression of becoming.
The unfolding of ambiguous time, coupled with the affirmation of ex-
posed space, functions as the central momentum for exploration. The signifi-
cance of the emergence of urban exploration, irrespective of its particular
manifestation, exceeds convention. Instead, the active engagement with ei-
ther decayed or forgotten place, autonomous from the heritage trial, coin-
cides with a broader shift indicative of the end of rational ordering. As ra-
tional 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 en-
croaches 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 be-
ing 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 ques-
tion 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 defi-
nite self-contained presence is lost. In the departure lounge, we are con-
fronted with a gathering of incomplete ends, temporal and spatial. The half-
life 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.
Phenomenologically, in spite of the ordered route of the departure

lounge, evident in the sequential determination of acts, the spatiality of tran-
sition 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 un-
dergo 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 innu-
merable 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 trans-
ferred 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. Hang-
overs and other ailments remind us of a native context which continues to ex-
ist 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 visita-
tion of a strange presence. As our aliments withdraw, the body and its time-
context 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 si-
multaneously. 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:
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 non-
space. 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 land-
scape. 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 de-
parture 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 re-
solved by the implication of ornate features and mock-historic signs of “tra-
dition.” 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 re-
mains. Yet in the exposure of desolation, the unnerving undercurrent of at-
traction 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 be-
comes 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 dia-
logue 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
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, preserv-
ing 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 depar-
ture lounge seek to conceal their lack of presence by employing homely re-
minders (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 fis-
sure. 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 pro-
hibition 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 accu-
rately (Tschumi, 1991, p. 72). Proscribing “dangerous” space secures the at-
traction of that space. At the same time, the domestication of space tames our
fears that boundaries will dissolve. The spatial double bind manages to ease
the anxiety of non-linearity, but also maintains enough exposure to that non-
linearity 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 ar-
ranged 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 na-
ture, 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. Simulta-

neously, it allows the architect to maintain a rational purity, otherwise cor-
rupted 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 dis-
tancing from “mere” trespassing. Trespassing suggests a limited mode of vio-
lation. 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 ur-
ban exploration fulfills the double bind of spatial taboo by enforcing prohib-
ited 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 under-
current, a structure summarized by Bataille: “Transgression opens the door
into what lies beyond the limits usually observed, but it maintains these lim-
its just the same. Transgression is complementary to the profane world, ex-
ceeding its limits but not destroying it” (Bataille, 2001, p. 87). Urban explo-
ration verges toward transgression without ever shattering it. Yet while urban
exploration retains a purely inquisitive outlook, whereby exploration is con-
ceived of in moralistic terms, its gradual reliance on a transgressive outlook
is inevitable. After Bataille, we realize that high moralism relies on a recog-
nition, and attraction, of low immoralism. The tacit theory of seduction is es-
sential to urban exploration. In the absence of conceptual thought, the
“profane” becomes the pivotal force. Thus, the more advanced urban explo-
ration 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.
• C H A P T E R F I F T E E N •
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 de-
cline 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 Civili-
zation, 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 unanswer-
able 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 pas-
sion can now be dispensed with. Cassandra remains buried, muted, and un-
able 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,
according to Hindu belief, nature is cyclical and as dependent upon the pe-
riod 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 similar-
ity 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
•SPACE AND CENTER• 195
emerges. The beginning of history and the end of history converge, the
boundaries ambiguous. In the wavering space in between, temporal uncer-
tainty forms.
We have seen in Chapter Five how a state of exile occurs subjectively as
consciousness comes to experience itself through recollection alone. The os-
cillation 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 re-
mains 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 tem-
poral 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, his-
toric consciousness collides with subjective consciousness by remaining in-
debted to a decayed identity. The lingering and irresolute uncertainty
persists. The aspect of disjointed temporality is especially clear in the cre-
puscular 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 poten-
tially unrealizable, since the surging of time perpetually reverts back, gather-
ing 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 mani-
festation. 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 dis-
organized trace. Because of this, associative “correspondences” between dis-
cursive subjects and incongruent temporal episodes, no matter how unclear,
are made possible. The ruins of history contest annihilation and negation.
The conceit of deeming history over usually proves premature. Between ab-
sence 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 wreck-
age 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 pro-
tagonist, 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 ren-

der 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 posi-
tion 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.

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 his-
tory 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 ontol-
ogy 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 de-
serts 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 de-
fined 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 prema-
ture and painful death. In spite of this, the occurrence of “illegal” settlers re-
claiming 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 vege-
tables, keeping chickens, and milking cows, the accident might have never
occurred. Homecoming and a sense of place thus discount the threat of dan-
ger and death.
In the case of illegal settlers residing in the exclusion zone, home neces-
sitates an intimate relationship between the shape of experience and the crea-
tion 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 experi-
enced, each an ideology which expresses earthliness and prosperity respec-
tively. 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).
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-at-
home 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 ontol-
ogy and space is rendered explicit when he makes the connection between
the sense of “homeland” and the history of Being. Recognizing the es-
trangement of modern humankind as symptomatic of the loss of the meaning
of Being, Heidegger’s diagnosis of homelessness centers around the disorien-
tation Dasein experiences as this loss is identified. We read how, “the home-
land 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 “com-
ing 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 pre-
carious unity between human consciousness and Being. Thereafter, the meta-
physical aspect of homelessness found its concrete counterpart.
Heidegger’s resolution to the problem of homelessness explicitly materi-
alizes in his later essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” Heidegger begins
by asking under what conditions it is possible for home to be built. The ques-
tion 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 dis-
tinction 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. Compla-
cency 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
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, deter-
mined not by ontology, but by subjective imagination. Relying on the imagi-
nation to substantiate the illusion of shelter, Bachelard thus values a well-
being 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 con-
tingent 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 resis-
tance 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 en-
closed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the house” (Ibid.). Such an asser-
tion 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 be-
ing. This distinction is maintained in Heidegger. Heidegger preserves an ac-
count of dwelling framed not by private intimacy, which would reinforce a
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-the-
world” (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 re-
lationship to Being and instead discloses the unfamiliarity of that which hith-
erto 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 consis-
tent 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 Hei-
degger prescribes an anxious form of freedom in which one must learn to
dwell alongside a sense of ontological homelessness, for Bachelard, the insis-
tence on the primordiality of shelter means that dwelling is ungrounded be-
fore 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 secon-
dary metaphysics” (Bachelard, 1994 p. 7). Since Bachelard makes an onto-
logical 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 ex-
perience 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 store-
house 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 ele-
mental in his phenomenology of dwelling. In conceding to the supremacy of
original experience, Bachelard aligns the past with what is able to substanti-
ate 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-
rial, Bachelard elevates the past to a fixed Platonic concept, immune to de-
cay.
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 en-
snare “a poetry that was lost” (Bachelard, 1994, p. 9). That daydreaming be-
comes 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 else-
where” (Ibid., p. 184). Bachelard’s concession to this flight into the else-
where 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 inas-
much as we claim that the ruin is determined by what is lost in it. For Bache-
lard, 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, anxi-
ety counters the given status of dwelling. The anxious roots of dwelling fig-
ure 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 be-
ing in its finitude: the sky above, the earth below. For Heidegger, both as-
pects 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. Mor-
tals 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 ne-
gation 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 reconfigura-
tion, the involvement of the elements lessens. In shopping malls and depar-
ture 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
new memories can be created by converting the site to a place. In Heideg-

ger’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 al-
leyway, 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 dis-
cover 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 be-
ing 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 construc-
tion 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 thought-
fully. 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 dis-
covered. If this is the case, then the tenability of the fourfold merits reap-
praisal. 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 dwell-
ing (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
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 cor-
ner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hal-
lowed 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 inven-
tion and inhabitation together. In Heidegger’s consideration, such a calcula-
tion is a crude error marked by the impression of homeliness alone.
Reversing this logic of false progress, Heidegger’s model of the fourfold rec-
ognizes the domineering facet of technology. In its place, the fourfold is
gathered through co-inhabiting the landscape. Already conscious of the four-
fold, we are simultaneously aware of the limits it imposes. Dwelling, there-
fore, becomes the act of caring for these limits without recourse to the work
of technology. Elsewhere, Heidegger writes of the infringement of communi-
cative 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 sur-
rounding 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 “authen-

tic” 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 “pro-
gressive” stage. The truth is the opposite. Through shadowing the gradual de-
scent 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 “disso-
lute” than the village retains a tacit presence. Writing on the degenerative ef-
fect the city has, Spengler is dogmatic:
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 be-
tween the city and nature is blurred. Summoning up the idea that the city is
higher than nature is immediately nullified when we encounter disused ma-
chinery, rusted to the point of deformation, with leaves and branches creep-
ing 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 veloc-
ity, 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 determi-
native form to which the course and sense of higher history generally con-
forms. 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 fu-
ture development of mass-produced architecture, which threatens to under-
mine 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 annihila-
tion of not only architectural place-names, but human names too is a neces-
sary consequence. In the shadow of the conversion from place to
homogenous site, the ruins linger. As communism, to take an obvious exam-

ple, becomes history, the buildings which once brought about its persistence
endure without their spiritual and political counterpart. Like all political ex-
aggerations, a monument such as the Warsaw Palace of Culture is either de-
rided 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 ideologi-
cal 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 ab-
sence of rationality, every city street and square would resemble the deso-
lated 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 ab-
sence, 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 dis-
solve within thirty years, due to the virulence of the rust gnawing upon their
frames. Thereafter, only the masonry will remain. In the meantime, the car-
bon 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 re-
sembling something altogether novel, a hybrid between motion and collapse.
In Pripyat, Heidegger’s fourfold falls into obscurity. Against the aban-
doned 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 barrack-
tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old
time by clearances and rebuildings” becomes superfluous as the law of ruin
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 re-
mains opposed by immobility, reconfiguring dwelling in accordance with de-
cline 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 possi-
ble 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 impres-
sions 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 his-
tory, 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
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 com-
plete 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 archi-
tecture 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 meth-
odology 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 re-
construction. In the case of Max Nordau, this was prefigured. For Le Cor-
busier, 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 overcom-
ing is especially pertinent in that Le Corbusier inverted the garden space by
conceiving the roof garden. Thereafter, the garden became an artificial para-
dise 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 revolu-

tionize 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).
Developing the modernist outlook while simultaneously refining it,

postmodernist architecture is an even clearer example of how spatial dissolu-
tion is evaded as surface appraisal takes precedence. After the drab exterior
of modernism’s puritanism, a re-invention of pluralism became central. Dif-
ference 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 post-
Modern architecture” (Pawley, 1998, p. 134). The absence of connection be-
tween place and the environment is central to the postmodern outlook. In
founding itself upon a “homogenized, de-historicized urban scene,” post-
modernist architecture ignores the origins of Modernism and the lineage of
destruction therein (Ibid.). After modernity, postmodernism exploits the dis-
tance 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 ex-
aggerated, is due to its untimely quality. Nothing belongs to the postmodern-
ist 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 per-
son, 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” (Gym-
pel, 1996, p. 107). The ruins of postmodernist architecture are already em-
placed 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 recog-
nize 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 tempo-
ral ontology thus remains unexamined. Yet the bond between home, shelter,
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 meta-
physical 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 prin-
ciples of art” (Hegel, 1993, p. 91). Writing on this intimate connection be-
tween 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 identi-
fied 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 con-
tradictions 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 spa-

tial 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.
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 fa-
miliar motion we associate with active space. With that combination, decay
gathers a detached and secure limit. The closeness to the center is itself cen-
tral and collectively affirmative. Hence, Yi-Fu Tuan’s claim that the “origi-
nal 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 col-
lective 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 in-
habit the lobby do so with a detachment from the everyday. They are tempo-
rarily 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 trav-
erse the center. In the city, sound aids our navigation: “...form in music
means knowing at every moment exactly where one is....” writes the musi-
cologist 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 pleas-
urable displeasure we experiences while in the center of things—wailing si-
rens, 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 qual-
ity that these sounds produce. Indeed, our tolerance to sounds is based upon
how familiar those sounds are.
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 ra-
tional 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.
Sound is narratological. When disrupted by an absence of temporal divi-

sions, 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 dis-
cover 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-
ticular exhibition. At the inception of Satie’s musique d’ameublement, audi-

ences 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 con-
tribution 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 in-
dustrial 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 re-
sults in a certain sameness. It goes in no particular direction. There is no nec-
essary 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 tempo-
ral 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 con-
sciousness which is removed from a utilitarian context, so allowing con-
sciousness 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 proc-
ess 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 asso-
ciated with productivity, streamlining, and aesthetic satisfaction. That the si-
lence 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 facto-
ries where rival factions strive to colonize each other’s territory, enforces the
negative role that post-industrial sound plays while simultaneously reinforc-

ing 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 out-
wardly 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 ef-
forts, attachments, opinions, turn on mechanism, and are of a mechanical charac-
ter…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 en-
croachment and not a benefit. The initial reaction against industrialism was
not an aesthetic resistance against iron and steel, or as it would later be, rein-
forced concrete, but a rejection of what symbolically embodied the un-
differential and so inhuman. This concern that the machine is a threat is ac-
centuated 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 explora-
tion—in Heideggerian terms, the fourfold—means that outright reverence to
nature is broken. The steam engine, according to Spengler, is the first in-
stance 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
the horse-powers run to millions and milliards, the numbers of the population in-
crease 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 Faust-
ian soul, the conclusion of which is closure. Spengler is intent on chronicling
a necessary pathway and not, contrariwise, aspiring to diagnose its resolu-
tion. That the desire to overcome nature is a symptom of the Faustian down-
fall does not render it immune from a bleak outcome, whereby “man has
become the slave of his creation” (Ibid., p. 412). Writing of the marginaliza-
tion 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 hu-
man being becoming a “slave of his creation” is drawn to its logical conclu-
sion 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 pro-
jected 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 pro-
grammed to continue life beyond the point of heat death, resulting in a post-
human 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-
ready a threat. With echoes of Schopenhauer’s ceaseless will, Lyotard writes

of technology as having an unquenchable thirst for technological develop-
ment. 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 harvest-
ing 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 homeli-
ness resides, as an artificial life. “How to make thought without a body pos-
sible” 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 inter-
stellar 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 ap-
pears to have vanished. Withdrawn into silence, the supermarket occupies a
position of autonomy. As the seamless operation of the supermarket is sabo-

taged, 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, conces-
sion 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 repli-
cated in the interaction between dereliction and decline. In preparing for a
future in a climate of fear, paranoia emerges regarding the embryonic possi-
bilities of the machine, evident in its potential to destroy. Likewise, the en-
croachment 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 dis-
placement 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 cen-
ter 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-
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 gather-
ing 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 pro-
tected 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 de-
ception. 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 com-
piled 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 frag-
mented 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.
Figure 15: Lime Mill. Courtesy of Shaun O’Boyle.

It is a center in which the uncanny takes precedence. We discover frag-

ments 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 decay-
ing 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 elevat-
ing us from the space of everyday perception. With this loss of volitional
consideration, the senses have the inverse consequence of becoming height-
ened. 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 con-
sequence. We feel compelled not to infringe upon the silence. With every in-
halation, 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 impres-
sion. In the factory, the severance of objects from their original context is ac-
companied 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 lin-
gering despite the absence of their origin, creates a sense of vivid disem-
bodiment: 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 dis-
ruption. 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
ruin, the dynamic between the absence of presence and the lingering reso-
nance 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 disintegra-
tion, 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 ex-
ist 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 Noth-
ing. 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.
• C H A P T E R S I X T E E N •
Memories in Ruin
Some would even fall in on purpose if they got too close to the Nothing. It has an ir-
resistible 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 ontologi-
cal 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 ar-
tifact, the significance of which is entirely negated. We will explore the full
implications of this distortion before outlining an ethics founded not in resto-
ration 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-
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, monu-
ments 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 rup-
ture 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 inti-
macy 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 im-
personal 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 monumen-

tality: 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-
•MEMORIES IN RUIN• 225
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 mem-
ber 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 unin-
tentional 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 premedi-
tated 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 physi-
cal 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 faith-
fully a monument’s original state is preserved, the greater its historical value: disfig-
uration 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).
After Riegl, we need to establish a distinction between historic and onto-

logical value. For Riegl, the monument’s worth is that it is able to communi-
cate historic values temporally. For that communication to occur, a
suspension of the ontological aspect of the built environment must be ne-
gated or denied its absolute status. Whereas monuments that convey a resis-
tance 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 monu-
ment 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 anti-
monument, which then renders it a meta-monument. The toppling of the Sad-
dam 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 monu-
ment. A similar inversion occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union. In Tal-
linn, 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, aban-
doned 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 mate-
riality” (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 sym-
bolic appreciation, is replicated in a space that has been determined by trag-
edy or violence. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11th
2001, the physical site of Ground Zero, New York became—and has re-
mained—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 re-
sistance. 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 ex-
perience can define their status. Created monuments, which presuppose me-
diation, 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
not mere things? By enforcing associations upon the monument, temporal

continuity is established in the absence of direct experience. Monuments be-
come recognizable as monuments largely through convention. The en-
trenchment of associations such as power, victory, or suffering entails that
meaning can be instilled into physical matter. Often, the associative relation-
ship 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 unambigu-
ous:
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 repre-
sent 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 “unceas-
ing 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 reten-
tion 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 pre-
serving 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. Re-
newal is inherent to the survival of monuments. Devoid of relevance to the
present, monuments become ruins. Yet renewal is often hampered by tempo-
ral 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
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 signifi-
cance 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 posi-
tively, it acquires the status of a mere thing, the function of which is to sig-
nify 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 spe-
cific memory from one age to another. With the decline of any firmly held
theological, indeed teleological, belief in the West, and with secularism be-
coming synonymous with a progressive form of liberal democracy, the need
for objects to convey a complex relationship between temporal events be-
comes requisite. Heritage takes the place of previous modes of spiritual en-
gagement. 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-
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 revision-
ist 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 monu-
ment. We shall now examine the danger of this impression, its essential inac-
curacy, 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 ur-
ban 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 cul-
tural 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 pro-
gress. 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 disinte-
gration of the Eastern bloc in 1989, and the ensuing development of splin-
tered liberal capitalist democracies, confirmed that history is over, and with
it, the last stage of evolution met. History has neither disproved nor exagger-
ated 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 “flour-
ish.” 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 po-
litical power gains an increasingly manipulative hold on the “electorate.”
Yet as the sense that things have deviated from their original configura-
tion intensifies, the desire to restore that corruption gains enthusiasm. Eco-
pessimism is the archetypal example of what happens when a culture be-
comes 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 tar-
nished 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 depar-
ture 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 devia-
tion, 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 vine-
gar, 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 proc-
lamation concerning the appetitive aspect of the Faustian soul. In desiring
mass production, human beings have had to make recourse to pesticides, syn-
thetic chemicals, non-renewable resources, and nuclear energy. The aware-
ness 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 fu-
ture generations will be able to create new forms of technology and syntheti-
cally engineered natural resources to amend the previous generation’s errors.
The cycle of aspiration, failure, and ruin is inevitable and largely uninter-
rupted. 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 un-
conceived (and inconceivable) future.
The recognition of an environment in decline becomes pronounced as
malaise hardens. Appearances force environmentalism to rethink how we are
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 en-
vironmental, political or sociological. Exactly what is expected is restoration;
what is experienced is failure. This fundamental incompatibility occurs be-
cause pessimism relies on the notion of progressive reason cultivating a
“golden” future. What environmentalism does identify correctly is the suppo-
sition that the human being is a privileged type of being from an ecological
perspective. We tend to think we have mastered the environment through be-
ing 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. Supe-
rior to non-human animals, the task of the human, so the assumption sug-
gests, 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 be-
cause of not being able to attain scientific objectivity, psychological objectiv-
ity, 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 appli-
cation of a rigorously narrow focus which simply screened out anything be-
yond 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-
à-vis cultural pessimism are, however, slim. Domesticating nature and bring-
ing order to chaos creates the impression of growth and control, yet the im-
pression 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 estrange-
ment 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 pessi-
mism 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 de-
cline” (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 hu-
manity, 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.
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 resis-
tance against the incompatibility between expectation and experience. The
resistance, as we will now see, presents itself in terms of materializing mem-
ory 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 in-
stead 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 re-
garded as the highest virtue. Both reason and humanism have sought to real-
ize 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, perma-
nency is not to be valued outright, but impermanency, discontinuity, and dis-
solution. 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. In-
deed, 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 my-
thologies, you say? Religions are at their last grasp? Look at the religion of
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 ap-
pears 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 man-
tels 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 rep-

resentation, 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 beauti-
ful 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 ra-

tional, 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 un-
receptive 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
opposition to a static representation of history. Against the closed and ex-

cluding 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” de-
signed to vanish beneath the surface over a number of years, disallows an
aesthetic mythologizing of the Holocaust. What remains in this disappear-
ance 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 in-
teraction, 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 conso-
lation, spatially and temporally, means that history is not content. So long as
spatial and temporal contingency are deferred, then a new kind of erosion oc-
curs—an erosion of meaning and depth which reiterates the fact that preser-
vation is misleading, deifying, as it does, the very thing it seeks to deny: the
impermanent. The stagnation with which the monument is presented impli-
cates 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 monu-
ments neglected, the nostalgic quality would disappear. Such a nostalgic sen-
sibility 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 be-
come monumental. This is because time has been willfully suspended in their
presence. Factually, the ancient ruin ought to have dissolved. In the place of
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, dur-
ing the moment of collapse, the reflective tendency to recollect what materi-
alized 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 mem-
ory fragments temporally, place strives to retain it. In this way, memories be-
come “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 mem-
ory implicates a division between external (biographical) and internal (her-
meneutic) narratives of memory. The evaluative connotations of this division
are clear: “localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than de-
termination 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 mem-
ory 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 ap-
parent insignificance of such questions is disproved by their ultimate vast-
ness. In structuring the topoanalytic investigation around the incidental,

Bachelard avoids a homogenous account of the home, determined by geome-
try 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 mythi-
cally, 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 in-
side 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, recol-
lection 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 men-
tally meant being able to recollect what was remembered in individual archi-
tectural 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 ru-
ined 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 Simon-
ides 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
lessened. Returning to familiar place becomes complicated when that dis-

tance 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 en-
forced 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 en-
counters 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 re-
stores 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 set-
ting” 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 align-
ment between time and place is only possible in temporal abstraction. The art
of memory falters in the ruin, because place and temporal continuity are dis-
continuous. 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 in-
formed 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, self-
contained, 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 re-
membrance. 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
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 any-
one. Because of this, memory becomes indeterminate, and thus non-linear.
The ruin does not bring us back to a definite temporal point. Instead, it sug-
gests 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 con-
fuse 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 un-
folding of wallpaper when it no longer adheres to its original surface, waver-
ing 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 revi-
sion of history is justified for a number of reasons other than heritage, econ-
omy, 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 reconsidera-
tion, since the relationship between place and memory is more complex. The
destruction of Warsaw’s Old Town and its subsequent physical reconstruc-
tion after the Second World War is a testament to the ethical complexity sur-
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, combi-
nation. Yet the preservation of the memory of destruction outweighs the de-
mand aesthetics makes on rationality. In formal terms, destroyed ruins and
decayed ruins are separate. When destruction undermines a city, decay oc-
curs as that city undergoes neglect. After time, decay and destruction appear
to merge, despite the initial reason that brought about the downfall. The mer-
gence is misleading, however, in that temporal entropy is the law of ruin
while violence is the law of destruction. For this reason, the distinction be-
tween the ethical imperative to remember destruction and the ethical impera-
tive 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 War-
saw 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 suc-
cess. 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 re-
alize in their everyday life that this town, which appears old, is to a great ex-
tent 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 hol-
lowness we experience in places that aspire toward a certain image, even
though gravity suggests otherwise, confirms the fact that restoration is fun-
damentally incompatible with the organic process of temporal entropy.
The detrimental effect that the application of artifice onto a destroyed ob-
ject has is repeated in the act of converting industrial architecture for domes-
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 build-
ings have been handsomely rewarded by profit as well as by accolade” (Bin-
ney, 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 ar-
cades. 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 con-
testing “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 main-
tains 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 Hali-
fax, 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 de-
ceit. 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 life-
denying imperative materializes. The relationship between aesthetics and on-
tology 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 rela-
tion, failure is conjoined with weakness, and weakness conjoined with anti-
progress.
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-
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 con-
sequently will outlive any such attempt to undermine it. We feel pleasure in
witnessing a staged demolition, because we have taken control of the proc-
ess. 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 fu-
ture in which new developments can supplant the former ruin, but because
decay has been denied and progress has been attainted. Progress and destruc-
tion, 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 stipu-
lated on the fact that it acts a reciprocal mirror corresponding ontological
time and subjective consciousness. The more we acknowledge this corre-
spondence, 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 deliver-
ance becomes imperative. Instead, hoarding, nostalgia, and preservation con-
spire 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, every-
thing has the potential to be monumentalized, then everything is tantamount
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 no-
madic, dynamic, and fragmented. So far, we have concentrated on memory
as a presence. Our task now is to apply this dynamism to the dialectic be-
tween 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 impenetra-
ble 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 in-
volves an interplay between recollection and imagination, both of which en-
deavor 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 dis-
carded. 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 criti-
cism. 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. For-
getfulness 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 ob-
jects. 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 des-
tiny, those flourishing plaints have in some way forgotten themselves in order to
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 attach-
ment 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 re-
lied on a single thread grounded by memory, suffers under this tribunal. In-
stead, identity is reworked so that discontinuity becomes tenable. Not being
the same as we remember ourselves to be establishes a measure of experi-
ence and thus progress. Without the sacrifice of historical familiarity, mem-
ory 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 illu-
sion 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 nos-
talgia 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 remem-
bered appreciatively. The memory of how we remembered things often reso-
nates 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 trans-
forms the negative that one finds there into something positive” (Gross,
2000, p. 71). The onerous aspect of memory, its insidious influence (rational-
ity) 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
of the past leads consciousness to recognize its temporal disparity and con-
tinued 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 mem-
ory was lost and the temporal present fell into disrepair. Thereafter, the flight
into nostalgia took hold. Nostalgia, paradoxically, forgets the past by imbu-
ing memory with a mythical lineage which maintains its constant temporal-
ity. For the nostalgic, the past is already at hand by its conversion to the
present. For this reason, nostalgic memory is necessarily untimely and un-
canny. 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, pre-
figured in the ruin, which testifies to the presence of the past, yet simultane-
ously 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, recol-
lection, 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,
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, rag-
ing, 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 con-
frontation is terse. Like the fragments of familiarity which exist in the ruin,
our consolation vanishes as musical centrality gives way to volatility and dis-
continuity. In that discontinuity, we discover the silence of memory, now ru-
ined. 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 alter-
ing 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 colo-
nized by the American army, became a gathering ground for temporal dis-
parities, none of which were unequivocal. Thus, at Imber, Georgia’s Rustavi
Choir paraded the empty streets, emphasizing the incongruity between tem-
poral and spatial planes, yet simultaneously underscoring the structural con-
sistency of disrupted memory. In the place of the ruinous disparity, we gain a
glimpse of memory coming undone by being inserted into the temporal pre-
sent 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.
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 under-
mined, recollection of history evades the imposition of false categories.
VII
From listening to Kancheli, let us now turn to the ruin, where critical mem-
ory 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 out-
side of the fence, a sprawling network of ruined hallways, broken glass, and
boarded-up windows hovers in the distance. Stark trees collude with dis-
carded remains. An entire history is alluded to before burying itself in obscu-
rity. 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 ero-
sion. 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 sensa-
tion is initially of trepidation. Everywhere we find the encroachment of wild-
life, 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 endless-
ness 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.
Figure 16: North Wales Asylum. Image by author.

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 na-
ture 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 re-
assurance 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 disinte-
grating. The decline of the ruin occurs when the ruin becomes an artifact. Ru-
ins might well be thought of as living organisms embodying notions of
progress, forgetfulness, and reclamation. We too must learn to forget the ru-
ins 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 dis-
pensed 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 fundamen-
tally 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 fi-
nality. 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, ra-
tional progress, and static remembrance. Since these three notions are predi-
cated on the idea that history is pushing toward an absolute goal, they are
manifestly incompatible with a world that claims to move. Constant becom-

ing-toward precludes finality and instead posits flux as its essence. Nonethe-
less, 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 per-
manent, 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 genera-
tions 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 them-
selves. This succumbing to dissolution can only be envisaged speculatively
from the present perspective, for it is a future that we may never see for our-
selves.
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Index
Adorno, Theodore, 68–69, 73, 81–84, 190 British Museum, London 106
aesthetic experience, xxv, 13, 16–18, 136, Brooklyn, New York, 160
142–143, 177–178, 184–185, 189, 243 Burke, Edmund, 147
Alberti, Leon Battista, 158 Burton, Robert, 47
alchemy, 45, 166 Byron, Lord, 180
alleyway, xviii, 156–159, 162, 189, 203 Cage, John, 13–14, 213
apartment stoop, 159–167, 172, 203 capitalism, xvii, xxviii, xxix, 86, 119–128
Arendt, Hannah, 58–59 Carlyle, Thomas, 214–216
Aristotle, 5–6, 86 Casey, Edward, 121, 188; and place
Aufklärung, 79 memory, 123; and place-cathexes,
Augé, Marc, 244; on childhood 123; on encounter, 128; on dwelling,
memories, 55; on memory, 234; on 160, 164, 203; on nostalgia, 56; on
non-places, 187; on oblivion, 243 shopping malls, 188; on site, 124–125;
Auschwitz, Poland, 68, 75, 234 on wilderness, 128
Bachelard, Gaston, 43, 55–57, 127–128, Chambers, William, 81, 106
155, 160–165, 169, 200, 210, 236– Chapman, Jeff, xi, 182, 185
238; on dwelling, 160, 200–201; on Char, René, v, xii, 29
inside and outside, 162; on memory, Chernobyl, Ukraine, 198, 206
43, 160; on the rationalizing of space, childhood home, 202
127 Christianity, xvi, 45–48, 63, 86, 101; and
Barr, John, 120–121, 137 earthly existence, 101; and the Fall,
Barrés, Maurice, 110 47; as regressive, 86
Bastille, Storming of, 80 Cicero, 56, 99
Bataille, Georges, 158; and taboo, 170, Cioran, E.M., 53, 64, 89
189–191 Comte, Auguste, 86
Baudelaire, Charles, 210; and decadence, Copernicus, Nicolaus, 102, 103
110; and decay, 111; on aesthetic corrosion, 106, 172, 176–178
experience, 16 cultural pessimism, xvii, xxi, 116–117,
Baudrillard, Jean, 67, 74–76, 101, 116, 119–120, 229, 231–233
193, 251 curators, 239
beauty, 150 cynicism, 116–117
Becker, Carl, 228 Dada, 71–72, 82, 175
Beckett, Samuel, xxxi, xxxiii, 83 Dawkins, Richard, 232
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 81 de Man, Paul, 70
Benjamin, Walter: allegory of ruins, De Stijl, 208
xxviii; on history, 23, 87, 195, 234 Death Valley, California, 129–130
Bergson, Henri, 36; on memory, 21–28; decay, xviii, 98–99, 182, 211, 218;
on time, 25–27 against progress, 99; ancient view
Biely, Andrei, 26 toward, 98; and Brighton, 151; and
Blake, William, 165–166 death, 241; and decline, 90; and
Blanchot, Maurice, 26–27 destruction, 184, 194, 238–240; and
body: as architectural unit, 187; imperfection, 102; and John Donne,
disembodied, 40; in place, 122 102; and morality, 101; and ontology,
Boulez, Pierre, 232 97; and perfection, 95; and Plato, 98;
Boym, Svetlana, 57, 226 and pleasure, 175; and progress, xix,
Brighton, England, 5, 151–152, 155, 175 148; and Romanticism, 109; and
ruination, 130; and sublimity, 155; and Environmentalism, 230

transgression, 101; and uselessness, Epictetus, 101
165; and water, 158; as celebrated, Epicureanism, 76–77, 99
106; as insidious, 101; as perfection, epistemology, 67–68, 71–73
95; as picturesque, 159; cosmological, Estienne, Charles, 101
102; domestication of, 141; ethics of, Eudemonia, 86
189; Greek view toward, 98; history exile, 39, 51; and Christianity, 47
of, 97; in Mesopotamia, 98; in the Existentialism, 82–83
alleyway, 158; natural, 226; object, faith: as home, 48; as reason, 86
xvii; of body, 40; of house, 62; of Feyerabend, Paul, xxii–xxiii, 67, 253
machines, 217; of staircase, 168; of fin de siècle, 74, 112–114, 117, 182, 185
staircases, 159; of the past, 202; of fire-escape, 172
thought, 96; on the stoop sale, 160; First World War, 72, 115
place of, xxv; potential of, 241; Flaubert, Gustave, 106
process of, 121; resistance against, Fludd, Robert, 165
227, 233; rhetoric of, 96; urban, xxvii, Foucault, Michel, 70, 76, 141, 253
145, 156, 178, 183, 191 Freud, Sigmund, 27, 42, 133; and the
Delacroix, Eugène, xii, 5, 100 death instinct, 171; on history, 58, 61–
delayed recognition, 37, 133 62; on soap, 207; on the uncanny, 30–
Democritus, xii, 5–6, 104–105 31, 131, 150
departure lounge, 161, 179, 186–189, 202 Friedlander, Saul, 75
Derrida, Jacques, 29, 39, 73, 78, 135–136 Friedrich, Casper David, xii, 5, 79, 107,
Descartes, Rene, 68, 124, 258 108–109
desert, 46, 122, 124, 126, 129–130 Fukuyama, Francis, 74, 229
destruction, 85, 141, 171, 196, 208, 230, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 18–19
232; aesthetics of, 239; and decay, Gandy, Joseph, xii, 5, 106–107
100; and ethics, 184; and progress, Garden of Eden, 46
242 ghosts, 128, 134–136
Detroit, Michigan, 145–146 Gilgamesh, 98
Dickens, Charles, 32 Gilpin, William, 106
Digges, Thomas, 102 Glendinning, Miles, 228–229
Dollimore, Johnathan, 103 Gnosticism, 46
Donne, John, 102–103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 19, 167,
Duchamp, Marcel, 137 180
dumpsters, 156 Goodman, Godfrey, 102
Dürer, Albrecht, 95 graffiti, 146, 156, 190
dwelling, 163, 167, 200; and lingering, Gray, John, 231–233
199; in the present, 198 Gross, David, 111, 244
dynamic stasis, 14–16, 21, 41, 91, 96, Ground Zero, New York City, 226
133, 151, 245 hangover: memories of, 187
dystopia, 205, 213, 214 Harbison, Robert, 60, 224
Ecclesiastes, 101 hauntology, 29, 135–136
Eco, Umberto, 168, 194 heat death, 215–217
Egyptians, 97 Hébert, Jacques, 80
Empedocles, 99 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: and
Ende, Michael, 223 aesthetic dualism, 136; and aesthetic
Enlightenment: the, xvi–xvii, 64, 67, 73, experience, 17; on architecture, 210;
78, 80, 102 on history, 63
entropy, 85, 159, 183, 207, 215–217, 237, Heidegger, Martin, 38, 200; and
240 homelessness, 54; and the four-fold,
•INDEX• 263
202, 207; and the Nothing, xxxiv, 5; on Kew Gardens, England, 106
anxiety, 7; on dwelling, 199; on not Khnopff, Fernand, 17
being-at-home, 45; kitsch, xvii–xviii, 58, 76, 150, 180, 206,
Heimat, 54 228, 240
Henry VIII, 120 Klee, Paul, 88
Heraclitus, 6, 99, 111, 253 Kracauer, Siegfried, xxiii–xxiv, 211
Hill, Richard, 169 Laing, R.D., 40
history, 61–63, 68, 74–75, 84–85, 88, 97, Le Corbusier, 190, 208
142–143, 182, 184–185, 193, 195, Lefebvre, Henri, 201, 225
206, 225, 233, 235; absence of, 125; Levinas, Emmanuel, 87
and memory, 37, 246; and nostalgia, Lilith, 46
86; and ontology, 198; and Oswald Locke, John, 35, 40, 59
Spengler, 114; and rational progress, Lombroso, Cesare, 113
87, 89 114; as static, 87; end of, 74– Longinus, 147
75, 84, 89, 195, 198, 229; estranged Lowenthal, David, 101, 106, 228, 234–
from, 194; failure of, 64, 115; in the 235, 240
ruin, 60, 136; industrial, 181; Lucretius, 99
intellectual, 84; manipulation of, 61; Lyotard, Jean-François, 67–71; and
modern, 101; natural, 90, 115; of a machines, 217; and science, 71; on
room, 62; of absolute past, 133; of artificial intelligence, 215
destruction, 209, 234, 243; of memory, Macarthur, Sally, 245
238; of reason, 79, 84; of space, 133; Macaulay, Rose, 137
of the staircase, 166; of the twentieth machines, 72, 115, 132, 214–217
century, xxi; post, 194–195; remains Mahler, Gustave, 81–82
of, 76, 195; revision of, 239; ruins of, mal de siècle, 110
195–196; secularization of, 86; spatial, Marx, Karl, 64, 86, 135
62, 157, 224; static, 58; without Mauclair, Camille, 13
rational progress, 86 McCarthy, Mary, 42–43
Hofer, Johannes, 53 memorials, 136, 234
Hoffman, Eva, 41 memory, 21–33, 35–38, 41–43, 55, 58,
Horkheimer, Max, 68, 73, 190 60, 75, 103, 130–135, 160–162, 202,
hotel lobby, xi, xxiii–xxiv, 161, 211–213 224, 227–228, 233–240, 243–247; and
Hume, David, 85, 207 place, 60– 63, 123–126; art of, 237; as
Husserl, Edmund, 9, 87 external, 55; collective, 60;
Huysmans, J.K., 109, 176–177, 180 dissociation of, 57; ethics of, 239;
Imber, England, 246 habit, 22, 26; haunted, 28; involuntary,
Impressionism, 81 28, 29; of destruction, 234; of
industrial archaeology, 179–182 violence, 15; politics of, 234; retention
Janz, Bruce, 57 of, 227; traces, 59; unbound, 28, 32,
Jaspers, Karl, 7 134; uncanny, 31; voluntary, 23
jetlag, 187 Mesopotamians, 97, 98
Jetztzeit, 87–89 metanarrative, xvi, 69–77
Julian, Philippe, 13, 17, 182 Metzger, Gustav, xviii, 175–178, 252
Jungk, Robert, 148 Michaux, Henri, 164
Kahn, Gustave, 110 Michigan Central Train Station,
Kali Yuga, 194 Michigan, 146
Kancheli, Giya, v, 7, 14–16, 41–42, 93, monuments, 223, 227; and history, 224;
245–247 intentional and unintentional, 225;
Kant, Immanuel, xvii, xxii–xxiii, 68, 79, neglect of, 182
147–148, 151 Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 227
Kaufmann, Walter, 8 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 81
Nerval, Gerard de, 45 threshold, 131; as altered, 131; center

New York City, New York, 116 of, 124; childhood, 121; in distinction
Newsted Abby, England, 120 to space, 122; locality of, 121; loss of,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 119; and amor fati, 123, 188; of ruin, 128–136; unreal, 122
112; and decay, 183; and knowledge, Plato, 19, 28–29, 98
166; on history, 233, 242–245; on Poe, Edgar Allan, 170, 210
place, 134; on progress, 185; on the Positivism, 86–87, 183
Fall, 48; skepticism, 73 post-industrial sublime, xvii, 148–150
Ninfa, Italy, 141–145 postmemory, 90
Nora, Pierre, 224 Postmodernism, xvi–xvii, 64–65, 67–83;
Nordau, Max, 110, 113–115, 208 and architecture, 209
nostalgia: aesthetic, 182; and decline, Pripyat, Ukraine, 198, 206
249; and irony, 76; and place, 56–57; Pristina, Kosovo, 142–143
and psychoanalysis, 54; as absolute, progress, 86; march of, 90; moral, 67
65; as mournful, 58; as untimely, 245; Proust, Marcel, 25–28, 36, 38
atemporal, 179; for history, 232; for Psalms, 49, 51
modern ruins, 236; for the absolute, rational progress, xxii, xxv–xxviii, 80, 86,
77; for the future, 64, 76, 229; 89, 95, 121, 171, 183, 186, 199, 207,
impossibility of, 55; in Bachelard, 232, 242, 249
201; in Hegel, 64; in Heidegger, 204; reason, xxi–xxiv, xxvii, 36, 47–48, 55,
in Mahler, 82; in postmodernity, 73; in 67–69, 72–74, 77–78, 84–89, 95–98,
the Psalms, 49; metaphysics of, 201; 104, 109, 116–119, 127, 136, 145–
morbid memory, 244; origins, 53; 148, 155–160, 173, 217, 223, 231–
placeless, 182; pre-emptive, 133 234, 249; age of, 79; as sovereign, 63;
nostalgie de la boue, 58 end of, 195; failure of, 84; history of,
Nothing, the, xvi–xviii, 4–9, 10–12, 16, 79–85; memory of, 194–195
18–19, 96, 118, 130, 136–137, 150, relativism, 70, 78
186, 196, 221–223, 242; and reverie, 24, 36, 49, 160, 163
centrality, 221; and decay, 96; and Riegl. Alois, 225–227
ruins, 95; and silence, 12; as aesthetic Rilke, Rainer Maria, 56–58, 152–153
experience, 18; holding out into, 172; Rimbaud, Arthur, 19
knowing, 12; of the desert, 130 Robespierre, Maximilien, 80
Novalis, 108, 256 Romanticism, 81–82, 104, 107, 180–183
“Now”, the, 87 Rome: decline of, 99, 102; ruins of, 101
ontology, xviii, 121, 135, 198–203, 209; Rosa, Salvator, xii, 5, 104–105, 128–129
and aesthetics, 151; denial of, 241 Roszak, Theodore, 231
Paracelsus, 46 ruins: abandoned, 81; ancient, 137, 145,
Parinibbana-Sutta, Maha, 97 149; and centrality, 211; and dwelling,
Paris Opera House, Paris, 169 199; and memory, 202, 238; and non-
Parmenides, 6 places, 189; and pillaging, 119; and
Pascoe, David, 187 place-names, 131; and spatial
patina, 180, 246 ordering, 130; and voyeurism, 184;
Petronius, 102 artificial, 106; as a double, 133; as
Picon, Antoine, 173, 256 haunted, 136; as icon of decay, 102; as
picturesque decay, 144, 159–160 monumental, 143; as ornamental, 104;
Piper, John, 239 as place, 128; as progressive, 121; as
place, xxii–xxiii, xxv, 8, 12, 18, 23–25, rational, 147; as unreal, 218; dwelling
31–32, 42–43, 87, 97, 121–125, 157– in, 200; future of, 223, 249; in motion,
163, 167, 173, 179, 185–186, 188–190, 249; modern, 179, 211; natural, 184;
196–207, 209–214, 225, 233, 236–241; of postmodernist architecture, 209; of
and nostalgia, 54–60; and temporal war, 184; sound of, 212; the use of,
•INDEX• 265
178, 241; urban, 150, 229; ruins, Stirner, Max, 64

artificial, 106 Stoicism, 101
Ruskin, John, 106 storehouse: of memory, 35, 162, 201, 227
rust, 131, 161, 172–178, 206 sublime, 147–148; in Kant, 148
Rustavi Choir, 246 Surrealism, 72, 166
Said, Edward, 200 Sutton, John, 59
St. Cyprian, 96 Symbolism, 107, 110, 117, 252, 254
St. Gregory of Nyssa, 101 Talmud, the, 46
St. John of the Cross, 50 Tarkovsky, Andrey, 11, 158
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7–8, 83 teleology, 64, 88, 228
Satie, Erik, 212–213 Templer, John, 169–170
Scheuchzer, J.J., 53 Theater of Marcellus, Rome, 5, 144–145
Schnittke, Alfred, 42 thought without a body, 216
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 216; on history, topoanalysis, 236–237
89; on money, 119; on music, 13–15; Tschumi, Bernard, 169, 184, 190, 208
vanity of existence, 37 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 43, 210–211, 217, 238
Sebald, W.G., 24, 37, 43, 95, 155, 195, Tzara, Tristan, 72
196 urban exploration, xviii, 179, 185–186,
Second World War, 54, 68, 166, 180, 199, 191
239 Venice, Italy, 106, 158
Seneca, 27, 101 Vergara, Camilo José, 145
Serialism, 82 Verlaine, Paul, 111
sexton beetle, 39 Versöhnung, 83
Shiel, M.P., 196 Vico, Giambattista, 114
shopping mall, 155, 161, 188, 202 Virginia Water, England, 106
silence: and violence, 12, 16, 96; as Virilio, Paul, 126–128
presence, 12, 48 Wagner, Richard, 81, 110, 167–168
Silvestrov, Valentin, 90, 117 Warsaw, Poland, 206, 225, 239–240
site, 123, 206, 226; as place, 203 Weber, Max, 124,
Situationism, 186 West Pier, Brighton, 5, 151–152, 155, 175
Soane, Sir John, xii, 5, 106–107 White, Hayden, 75
Sorkin, Michael, 125 Wilde, Oscar, 58, 103
Soviet Union: fall of, 14 wilderness: of Jeremiah, 47
space: and power, 186; as placeless, 125; Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 26, 59, 69
naming of, 122; transient, 203; urban, Wölfflin, Heinrich, 168
163 Woodward, Christopher, 180
Spengler, Oswald, 95, 117, 193–194, 230; Yates, Frances A., 56, 237
and machines, 214; and the city, 204; Young, James E., 235
on progress, 114; on space, 126
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

The Aesthetics of Decay

Robert Ginsberg, General Editor

The Aesthetics of Decay

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Bibliothek.

Cover image courtesy of Damian Watson

© 2006 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

All rights reserved.

Intensity is silent. Its image is not. (I love everything that dazzles me

René Char, “Redness of the Dawnbreakers”

Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

List of Illustrations .............................................................................................. xi

Part One: Memories Unbound ............................... 1

Part Two: Succumbing to Dissolution ...............93

Works Cited .....................................................................................................251

1. Eugène Delacroix, “The Death of Sardanapalus,” 1827–1828

For permission to reproduce their following paintings, my sincere thanks

unmediated experience is undermined by the ubiquitous nature of memory,

Chapter Twelve and Chapter Thirteen confirm the previous argument by

creates a space in which the end of rationality converges. Thinking alongside

to the ontological value of aesthetics, and so justifies the epistemological

while the present book is implicitly indebted to Benjamin’s analysis of capi-

Soon there will be nothing where there never was anything.

Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing

Tarrying with the Nothing

historical and philosophical linage concerned with unraveling the paradox of

Heidegger’s account of anxiety is characterized by an existential frame-

sion between consciousness and self-consciousness. If the self is dissolved

At stake in Heidegger’s account of metaphysics is an ethics of inquiry

Silence, Violence, and Nothingness

is: does the phenomenology of experience disclose an allusion to nothing-

having a language of its own. This is confirmed in Schopenhauer’s persua-

Elsewhere, the composer writes that, “in my own evaluation of my mu-

minor sixth, compelling it toward the dominant, is suspended in Kancheli. In

Nature is a temple, where the living

As the long echoes, shadowy, profound,

Baudelaire’s poem reminds us that aesthetic experience is framed by a

writes, “Goethe’s statement ‘Everything is a symbol’ is the most comprehen-

And so outside the Louvre an image gives me pause:

with the object present; it is impregnated with memory-images which com-

If the repetition constitutes a recollection, then it remains only an act of

This inner sphere of time, which Bergson terns “durée” (duration) is a

Wait a while until I come

Char’s poem encloses and encircles the spatial center by establishing an

tion of temporal continuity. Encountering the object, we also encounter the

Ascribing the violence depicted in the tale to a latent fear of castration,

nomenological intentionality whereby consciousness draws from the object

The Specter of Exile

If the involuntary resists volition, then reverie becomes the means by

engaging in that closure can experience be gained. Similarly, as time passes,

In Kancheli, we observe how the dual consciousness of exile is com-

In Giya Kancheli’s symphonies, it is as though in a comparatively short time (twenty

With compressed time, nomadism creates the impression of movement.

is to be stripped of a sheathing, which in its familiarity protects the human

Immense distance falls in between the various places of memory, spatial

Dark Night of the Soul

of degree is important. We remain in the simulated place of pure presence.

fication of memory traces as continuity builders, the question of where those

The Decline of Postmodernism?

Repentance is part of post-modernity.

Adorno’s model of fragmented knowledge, together with his critique of

Lyotard’s “incredulity” toward the metanarrative is central to the tempo-