Ruins Of Modernity Research Articles

Visual Representations of Abandoned Industrial Spaces in Tourist Photos

A few decades ago, an enthusiastic researcher would have found relatively few data to analyze, looking for such information about the ruins of modernity as the structural consequences caused by rapid cycles of industrialization and desolation, development and depopulation, conflict and reconciliation. However, conducting the same search today reveals an extraordinary increase in academic and public interest in the ruins of the recent past and the associated abandoned places. The authors of this article join in the discussion and explore the images of deindustrialization posted and distributed in the online communities among abandoned sites enthusiasts. The aim of the research is to form an idea of “everyday life policy” about the abandoned industrial facilities popularized by amateur photographers. “Everyday life policy” is expressed through the signifying and conceptualizing the abandoned and ruined places when putting them in a close-up. The authors rely on the ideas of the architect and historian I. de Sola-Morales, who calls the places left by people “terrain vague”. Photographic images of the terrain vague spaces play an important role in conceptualizing them. In order to understand what meanings exactly shaped the public policy, the authors use the ethnographic method of immersion in the online VKontakte/Telegram communities of abandoned sites enthusiasts to discover the recurring iconographic elements of the derelict places. Deindustrialization in photographs is reflected through 1) loss of human; 2) violence of vegetation or nature agency; 3) artifacts and texts of the past or material objects agency. The authors discuss the similarities of the images taken by amateur photographers and those media clichés found in popular movies and video games. Photographs are a way of explaining space and spatial experience. Furthermore, like any other work of art, a photo conveys not only and not so much the actual characteristics of the depicted objects, thanks to which we can form an idea about them (in this case, about space), but also effects and experiences. Thus, a photograph becomes a tool that helps us form value judgments about the places we have seen.

IN SEARCH OF IDENTITY IN THE RUINS OF THE PROJECT OF OFF-MODERNITY

Along with innumerable attempts to define the paradigmatic changes at the turn of the 20th /21st centuries, it is worth considering the concept off-modernity, proposed by the culture researcher Svetlana Boym who mentions the essential signs of the age: nostalgia, a search for identity in the ruins of modernity and understanding of the footprints left by the influence of time and various contingencies. The concept of off- modernity allows us to pay attention to such phenomena as the so-called identity of error, nostalgia, ruins or migrant. The paper explores the possibilities of the formation of these identity modes in Western European cultural space at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of 21st century. The paper also deals with the case of Latvia in the context of the formation of post-Soviet identity. By making use of the view point of the theory of off-modernity proposed by Boym, the paper evaluates the models of interpretation of past experience for the purposes of self-definition today with an aim to create a framework for analysis of various actual social-political and cultural conflicts in the Western world.

A New Image of Humanity? A Transcendental in the Making

If it is true that at the core of the Enlightenment project was an attempt to discover a new definition of human nature itself, there is no doubt that for a long time, and today more than ever, there is a similar urgency to find a different vision of humanity, since the prevailing one – heir of the Enlightenment – is perceived from many sides as in need of a profound revision, if not catastrophic. if we are living in the ruins of modernity, we should neither attempt to embalm them, nor to raze them to the ground. This article maintains that Kant’s work on the reflecting judgment (along with a productive reinterpretation of notions such as «finality», «exemplarity», «heautonomy») can offer precious resources to reshape that image of humanity that we feel is now inadequate in the face of the complexity of our forms of life, without the need to abandon ourselves to old and new longings for the absolute.

Searching for Meaning with Victor Frankl and Walker Percy.

Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning can enlighten clinical encounters for physicians to see patients on a search for meaning, particularly amidst suffering and tragedy in a post-modern world lacking transcendence. As shown in Walker Percy's literature, however, ultimate meaning can only be found in Christian faith where the Word became flesh and continues to dwell among us.

On Gathering: Or, The Birth of Global Fiction from the Spirit of Tragedy

AbstractThis article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends “imagined community” from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such as Wendy Brown have shown how global economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in “British” works attuned to the disintegration of the liberal world-system a model of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest how gatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity.

The Ruins of Urban Modernity: Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’ by Utku Mogultay

 Reviews Blair ultimately dismisses theoretical perspectives though, maintaining a strictly evolutionary line in her readings of Woolf. But while she demonstrates how Woolf’s novels may be therapeutic in some sense, there is little specific evidence in the book establishing narrative’s unambiguous role in evolutionary adaptation. Instead, Blair occasionally resorts to hypothetical just-so stories about early humans and passé Jungian archetypes from Joseph Campbell. Besides these interpretative missteps, the book also suffers from a number of conspicuous errors and stylistic tics. Blair frequently misspells the Ramsay family as ‘Ramsey’ in discussions of To the Lighthouse and incorrectly refers to the title of the novel Mrs Dalloway as ‘Mrs. Dalloway’. She also strings together numerous unanswerable queries, such as, ‘What does it mean to be human? What is the meaning of life? What can life mean in the face of certain death?’ (p. ). It is also unclear why Blair tends to capitalize the first letters of ‘Human’ and ‘Story’, despite never using those terms in anything but an ordinary, non-technical way. One of the main strengths of Blair’s book, however, is how it is framed by personal instances of grief and loss—both from Blair herself and from Woolf—adding a welcome immediacy and urgency to her readings while also making them open to more general readers. Each of the chapters on Woolf’s novels productively mines her endlessly fascinating diaries, providing a rich biographical dimension to the texts in question. ese more intimate forays reaffirm that if, as Blair suggests, ‘[s]tories help us with this imprecise science of life’s navigation’ (p. ), we would be well served to revisit the life and works of Virginia Woolf for guidance. B C M G e Ruins of Urban Modernity: omas Pynchon’s ‘Against the Day’. By U M. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Utku Mogultay is a very learned critic who persuades us that Pynchon’s Against the Day is not just zany and deliberately obscure. Rather, Pynchon is deeply read in the history and concept of cities, up to speed on modernist vs. postmodernist theories of cities, and drawn to popular fiction, which he recycles as pastiche or irony. Mogultay focuses on ideas about cities, since several famous ones function as significant locations and undergo phantasmagoric changes in the course of the novel. e theories of what a city was and should be were emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the time-frame of Against the Day’s complex plots. New building techniques and forms of transportation made immense city growth—vertical and horizontal—possible, but also brought new problems. e  World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago produced a model city center as the fair’s high-culture showpiece. Neoclassical façades with extended waterways flaunted prestige by taking elements from Rome and Venice. e Midway Plaisance held the popular displays: tribal villages, belly dancers, Buffalo Bill’s Wild MLR, .,   West show, and other amusements to be gaped at. Pynchon’s adventure-hero aeronauts , the Chums of Chance, visit the fair, as do Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Merle Rideout, Lew Basnight, and several other characters. e focus on cities, Mogultay argues, spreads out from the Exposition, and in many we find variations on themes first offered here. e Archduke goes slumming in the Black region of Chicago, and that desire to view enclaves touristically is repeated in other cities, particularly in Venice and New York. e city is theorized as spectacle, and as something to be arranged in the viewer’s memory as an adventure. e city is also studied in terms of its governance and planning. Some of Pynchon’s work, as Mogultay shows, sets up the city as the new frontier, and Pynchon makes use of popular frontier novel tropes both in themselves and as they morphed into detective plots, first about the Pinkerton men, then in London with the Sherlock Holmes style of operator, and then as the focal figure of hard-boiled noir fiction. All three phases of detection are undertaken by Lew Basnight in his quest to understand himself morally. He must in the end admit his...

Dentro il Laboratorio di Latour: per una sociologia dei Terrestri

Following Latour’s research itinerary, we are invited to enter his Laboratory in Paris, where a cartography of earthbound life forms is giving shape to new ecologies of possible worlds in the Anthropocene. A new mission for sociology and a new form of universality become both possible, through which we can learn ways of living amidst the ruins of Modernity, while sharing our territories with those who are escaping from theirs, due to the New Climate Regime.

‘Ruins of Modernity’: The Critical Implications of Unfinished Public Works in Italy

AbstractSince the 1950s, the construction of public works has been a significant element of Italy's focus on modernization. Numerous instances of malpractice have resulted in frequent failures of this form of development, with the result that many projects have remained unfinished for decades. In 2007, a group of artists called Alterazioni Video declared these ‘ruins of modernity’ to be a romanticized architectural style; in doing so, their aim is to imbue the sites with new value and dignity. This article uses the artists’ argument as a point of departure to theorize about unfinished public works within the framework of interdisciplinary literatures on modern ruins. In addition, since modern ruins by definition hold a critical meaning––which the artists deliberately excluded from their narrative––the article takes into account the obscure political and economic circumstances causing this phenomenon. After remarking upon specificities and similarities to unfinished neoliberal topographies generated by the 2008 financial crisis, it is concluded that unfinished public works in Italy represent an interesting case serving to enrich debates on incompletion.

From Pompeii to Paris: ghostly cityscapes and the ruins of modernity in Théophile Gautier and Eugène Atget

This article explores visions of urbanity in the second half of the nineteenth century through Théophile Gautier’s writings and Eugène Atget’s photography, where the city appears depopulated, disembodied, and haunted by the clutter of mundane urban furnishings. Viewed through the prism of a new discipline (archaeology) by Gautier and a new medium (photography) by Atget, ruined buildings, decaying streets, graffiti, and enseignes, cart tracks and dingy storefronts configure an aesthetics of modernity. This aesthetics exploits the potential of the marginal, fragmentary, and disjointed debris of modernity to define urbanity in the absence of the human element. The ‘rags’ and ‘refuse’ from which Benjamin would later construct his Arcades allow Gautier and Atget to articulate a creative tension between the fragments of historical layers, imbued with the memory of humanity, and their impact on the viewer. The deserted cityscape becomes a narrative strategy with epistemological and ontological implications in the spatiotemporal experience of urbanity: in this space, the banal, unintentional detail comes to articulate urban and/or modern identities.

Investigating the “Ruins of Modernity” of the city: The case of Stone Ateliers, Denizli

Investigating the “Ruins of Modernity” of the city: The case of Stone Ateliers, Denizli

Reviews: Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation, Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic, Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Conrad's Secrets, British Writers and MI5

Reviews: Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain, Reading Literature Historically: Drama and Poetry from Chaucer to the Reformation, Rethinking Historicism from Shakespeare to Milton, Travel Writing and the Natural World, 1768–1840, Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic, Roomscape: Women Writers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Conrad's Secrets, British Writers and MI5

Situating nature: Ruins of modernity as náttúruperlur

The aim of this article is to contribute to problematizing the notion of nature in Icelandic nature-based tourism. Despite a fairly robust recent definition of nature-based tourism by the Icelandic Ministry of Industry as “travellers’ varied experience of nature,” in fact, the definition of nature in this context seems limited to places supposedly unspoilt by human influence, and that rather simplistic understanding seems overly prevalent in the discourse of Icelandic tourism. The concept of “nature-based” tourism is necessarily reductive if it is limited to areas conceptualized as pristine. Many places that are identified primarily through their anthropogenic features would not be adequately understood without considering their ecological properties, and certain areas with significant anthropogenic elements give rise to specific—and in many ways unique—experiences of flora and fauna. Central among them are ruins, where ambiguous space is occupied spontaneously, where interactions with the nonhuman can be more unexpected, startling, and dangerous than in more regulated areas. If tourists come to Iceland chiefly due to the country’s spectacular náttúra, the Icelandic tourism industry is well advised to be mindful of the many derelict and abandoned contemporary structures found across the country.

Concrete matters: Ruins of modernity and the things called heritage

Intangibility has become a trendy term within heritage studies and is now even considered to refer to heritage in general. This article discusses this development, along with its integrity and consequences for the fate of things in the heritage discourse. With reference to the concrete ruins of Iceland’s recent past it addresses the traditional and contemporary processes of discrimination and othering within heritage definitions, and the often fragile dialectic between heritage and waste. With a foothold in these very concrete and tangible remains the article questions the emerging claim ‘that all heritage is intangible’ and suggests that a broader heritage conception, and a true concern for the very tangible qualities of things, may bring us closer to a comprehension of the (heritage) value of these modern ruins.

Ruins of Modernity. Edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. xv + 511 pages. $25.95.

Ruins of Modernity. Edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010. xv + 511 pages. $25.95.

Diseasing the City: Colonial Noir and the Ruins of Modernity

Diseasing the City: Colonial Noir and the Ruins of Modernity

Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity

This essay identifies the potential of an emerging archaeological turn for anthropology—and for archaeology itself. I argue that despite the critiques of the past two decades, the temporality of modernity and a belief in its exceptionalism still structure much of anthropological thought, as exemplified in the division of archaeology and ethnography and in the subfield of historical archaeology and its dystopic treatment of modern urban ruins. But alternative temporalities and analytical possibilities are also emerging, ones attentive to the folding and recycling of cultural elements that Walter Benjamin described with such philosophical depth. On the ground, Benjamin’s insights can be put to use by paying greater attention to the spatiotemporal dynamics of capitalism’s creative destruction, to the social life of ruins, and to projects that challenge the linear divide between modernity and antiquity. Releasing anthropology from progressive time necessarily entails a reintegration of the subfields and a direct engagement with recent ruins.

The High Line

History breaks down into images, not into stories. --Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk City of New York has a new public space. High Line is an eight-block stretch of defunct elevated train track remade into a public park that opened in June 2009. This renewed, reclaimed ruin embodies several key moments in modernity: steam engine, public promenade, flaneur, arcade, and cinema--as articulated by Walter Benjamin. Effectively, High Line functions as a monument to ruins of modernity. However, as a contemporary site designed by savvy architects, High Line is neither a simple representation of modern forms nor a replay of a nineteenth-century monument--one that claims permanence while articulating a triumph inevitably passed. Presenting a scripted urban imaginary, High Line suspends visitors in a state of collapsed time and space organized into cinematic images--one that invites them to reflect on collective experience of metropolis. High Line runs along Manhattan's West Side near Hudson River, currently reaching from Gansevoort Street in Meatpacking District to 34th Street in Chelsea. Designed by James Corner Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio & Renfro, track has been transformed into an elevated urban park, a sculpted that meanders slightly through buildings along 10th Avenue. High Line was built in 1930s to enable efficient delivery of goods to and from industrial businesses and to prevent accidents with street-level traffic. Mail, milk, poultry, and automobiles could be loaded and unloaded directly into buildings that opened onto track. This freight-only line was known as The Life Line of New York. Out of use by 1980, it was abandoned until 1999, when Friends of High Line began campaigning to develop elevated land into a public park. Today, walking up stairs to three-story-high space, visitor enters a magical zone. Immediately lifted from drudgery, dinge, and chaos of city streets, one ascends to wild landscaping, fresh views, wooden benches, strolling citizens, and buildings parting to make a path. Standard Hotel towers over southern stretch a magnificent relic of International Style architecture. Slits in irregular concrete ground transition into selectively preserved stretches of train track that serve as plant beds. It is a disorienting, yet strangely harmonious blend of industrial decay and ever developing city, of nostalgia and innovation. landscaping is especially uncanny as grasses, flowers, and small trees fill gaps in what remains of tracks. Keep it wild, keep on path signs instruct passersby, as if landscaping were indigenous, happenstance. grasses and flowers look suspiciously like weeds, but perfectly arranged and tended to. This celebration of a once seamy and neglected space artfully finesses effect of dereliction, giving way to a safely sanitized experiential pleasure. ruin is renovated. TRAIN If one could choose a primary icon for modernity it might be steam engine. invention of steam engine introduced unprecedented speed and efficiency to movement of goods and people during nineteenth century, thus enabling industrial capitalism--the distribution of consumer goods produced by industrialized labor and tourism. According to Marx, the key aspects of modernity were dramatic changes in consciousness brought about by industrialized space and time--the 'annihilation of space by time.' (1) Trains of all types were a mainstay at World's Fair exhibitions of nineteenth and twentieth centuries, celebrating spirit of technological innovation. This progression of train exhibits, including steam engines, diesel trains, and elevated subway trains, culminated in use of monorails during 1962 and 1964 World's Fairs. Today, a monorail is centerpiece of Disney World's Epcot Center Future World. …

Mobile modernity: Germans, Jews, trains

Acknowledgments1. Dialectics at a Standstill2. Berlin and DelosCelan's No-Places and Heidegger's Homecomings: Philosophy and Poetry Out of Material History3.Sicily, New York City, and the Baranovich StationGerman/Jewish Subject Without a Nation: On the Meta-epistemology of Mobility and Mass Migration4.The North SeaJews on Ships or, How Heine's Reisebilder Deconstruct Hegel's Philosophy of World History5.Nuremburg-F rth-PalestineSome Assembly Required: Global Anxieties and Corporeal Fantasies of German/Jewish Nationality6.AuschwitzThe Fabrication of Corpses: Heidegger, Arendt, and the Modernity of Mass Death7.Vienna-Rome-Prague-Antwerp-ParisThe Railway Ruins of Modernity: Freud and Sebald on the Narration of German/Jewish RemainsConcluding RemarksNotesIndex

Politics without Nostalgia

Politics without Nostalgia Diana Coole (bio) Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001). When Wendy Brown writes about ‘Politics out of History’ she does not mean an ahistorical politics, but a politics that has lost its mooring in History as a grand narrative of progress. She accordingly situates her work within that paradoxical space where modernity and postmodernity — structured history and posthistoire — are entangled. Here she identifies a pervasive cultural and political malaise: a residual bad faith whereby we fetishise or mourn the anachronistic forms of a more meaningful history even as we jettison their foundations. Her aim is to think through the possibilities that emerge from these ruins of modernity and to resist the dangers of a reactionary, moralising or nostalgic politics that all too readily emerges from anxieties incurred on the threshold of post-modernity. Indeed she strikes a rather recuperative note in her introduction by espousing the hope that history ‘may finally become our own’ (p.17). While the volume’s seven chapters are relatively free standing, each offers a perspective on this dominant theme of disintegration and possibility. Brown elicits key political signifiers that grant particular chapters their focus: morality, desire, power, conviction, progress. In each case she tries to combine criticisms of their current functioning with an account of their fragmentation and allusions to the opportunities that might yet emerge from their disintegration. Although a few contemporary examples are used, this is for the most part accomplished by a close, if often creative, reading of primary texts (by Nietzsche, Foucault, Marx, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin and so on). While this lends the book as a whole a somewhat fragmented appearance (no doubt appropriately so), it is held together by the excellent first chapter. Brown tells us here that her analyses are primarily ‘diagnostic’ and this opening essay indeed provides an incisive summary of the diverse elements and problems that have been associated with postmodernity (although this is not a term Brown herself favours). Each study, she tells us, ‘examines a few strands of the condition that this waning has produced’ and tries to ‘open’ its possibilities (pp.16–17). The language in which these ambitions are expressed looks reminiscent of critical theory, but Brown’s thinking is always inflected by Nietzschean concerns about life-denying nihilism and ressentiment as well as by a psychoanalytical perspective and a Foucauldian sensitivity to the pervasiveness of modern forms of power. In a refreshing departure from the merely ethical orientation that has marked many recent writings in this genre, Brown’s emphasis is firmly on politics. Her sympathy for a broadly leftist agenda is evident despite a sometimes uncritical acceptance of Engelsian and poststructuralist reductions of Marxism to a crude expression of teleology and economism. I mention the latter because it seems to me that a more sympathetic reading of historical materialism — as an ongoing methodology of historical analysis where material and ideal developments are recognised as dialectically interwoven — might have served Brown’s purposes very well. She is certainly interested in Marx, whose work is the subject of the fourth chapter. But the Foucauldian interpretation offered here, while original and scholarly, leaves us with an unsatisfyingly disengaged, abstract (structuralist) Marx who reified Power rather than analysing history’s contingent and emergent forms. This indeed lays Marx open to many of the criticisms Brown makes, but an emphasis on Marxism as a critical methodology might have allowed her a more congenial conclusion; one replete with opportunities for analysing contemporary socio-political and material as well as psycho-cultural structures. In Brown’s account, for example, alienation and commodity fetishism appear as psychological rather than objective conditions, while Marx’s aim of exposing their origins in social relations, and hence their contingency and amenability to political intervention, is underplayed. Instead the demystifying, denaturalising work of phenomenological or dialectical interrogation is accredited to Foucault, whose genealogical approach is described in the fifth chapter. Brown seems generally happier with this approach and her account of it is persuasive. Yet many of the virtues she ascribes to it were already practised by critical modernists in the Marxist tradition, while their work had the advantage of summoning the kind...

Ruins of (European) Modernity

A review of Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Duke, 2010).