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The Aesthetics of Ruins
The aesthetics of the ruins; a
phantom born out of the alliance of Nature with Time.
In the
traditional reading the ruin stands as a performative monument to
finitude. Nature and time form an
alliance that is guarantied to bow the head of the proudest civilisations,
bring to nought all dreams of eternal continuance (Volney, Simmel). Fate, in its negative aspect, triumphs
over all that would dare to defy its claim over the realm of eschatology. Not
just cities, civilisations and cultures, but Mankind itself is to be read as
humbled, must recognise itself as over-reaching, as smug and self-satisfied,
and so in need of an allegorical lesson in humility, contingency, and
mortality. All things must pass. Et in
Entropy
is another name for this degradation over time, for this loss of vitality, this
fall into obsolescence. The lintel cracks and the old gods refuse to respond to
lukewarm offerings at cold altars until the society in question dies-out or
moves on (in its culture and religion, or across a geography in the act of migration). Eitherway the buildings of
the old order become ruins. What survives is simultaneously a monument to
grandeur and to the failure of that grandeur. We witness the fall of a
civilisation from the pinnacle of its cultural production; the long fall from a
pride underwritten by power to the depths of a trace existing only as a passive
reminder. Blind scripts etched on silent walls; staring faces that reappear from
beneath flaking plaster, the vast halls in which they are found, illuminated
only by sun beams trailing dust motes, ghosts of populations long gone; the
sparse artefacts of a civilisation surviving only as a testament to its own
lack of sufficiency, to its inability to survive, to repeat, to return. (As
exemplified by Shelley's double voiced, ironic epigram: 'Look on ye mighty and
despair').
Ruins
survive as the visible traces of myth and as monuments to an all-consuming
entropy. Order is eaten by Disorder.
At the command of chaos termite armies gnaw incessantly into the wooden
frame of Structure. System dissolves down into the prior level of organisation;
and so on. From the dissolution of human institutions to organic decay to the
permafrost of the inorganic, and finally to the dispersion of stellar dust,
this tendency for things to fall apart appears to govern existence in all its
forms. The contrary motion is provided by reproduction and renewal; the
application of greater amounts of energy. Not only is the labour of love
required for reproduction, the building of community, and for its physical
manifestation, architecture, but also for its maintenance. Labour and ritual
are the twin pillars which negate the negative slide into the entropic. The
love of labour is blest by the labour of ritual. The work of the blessed shores
up the rotting timbers of the social. And the relentless lapping of the tides
never ceases. A sea that would dissolve into itself all things caresses the
foundations of form itself.
On the
personal level, the contemplation of ruins often conjures up a mood of wistful
nostalgia. A vision of a lost utopia-in-the-past; like a decayed pleasure
garden where only the overrun paths are left to remind one of lost joy. The remains of a dwelling, a
once-protective cocoon, now appear cracked open like an egg, have become a
metaphysical shelter without roof, an unhomely and (Unheimlich) uncanny home.
Every ruin a haunted house, its gardens enchanted by the murmur of lost voices.
Echoes of a future perfect. The experience of ruins: a personal combination of
emotion and association; of a past to be redeemed in the future. A Janus-head,
facing forward and backward: a place where past and future work together in a
trope combining the literal present with a figural past and future. The
resulting image-affect: an impossible, unachievable, always already lost ideal.
A playground of ghosts. The
landscape of a dimly remembered opium dream. A veil of second meaning which
relies upon temporality for its tremulous existence; the wash of rain on
watercolour. We watch the superimposition of significance onto a screen; whilst
the flicker of light throws back dancing images, behind the screen, the shadows
of trees move in the wind. The curtain of time opens onto a personal stage,
landscape with ruin, on which invisible actors will play out the dreams of
individuals, the play-within-a-play of their culture's hopes and fears.
In this
way, in our 'now' (for us of the present, and for the present) the ruin is
found bearing traces of Utopia. These may suggest a prospective Blessed State,
or propose the State as blessed. Or the pale light of the rose among the stones
of the ruin may indicate the Time of the Blessed; the end of time (eternity as
the end of temporality). Strange reversal that finds in the ruin the harbinger
of Cure, the silent prophet of Return (whether envisioned as Second Coming or
as reinstatement of the
Fantasy,
even when existing as an image, still implies an accompanying narrative; and
narrative is what entropy guarantees. The arrow of time with its clothing of
signs, from the stories and tales of everyday life to the myths and epics of
social justification, every version of narrative, all are dependant upon the
irreversibility underwritten by the entropic gradient. Yet the being of society
is so utterly underwritten by narrative, that the effect of entropy must also
be understood as the foundation of the very forces that act to oppose it. The
countermanding influences of order, construction, reproduction (of things, of
beings, of social forms, of signs) and the exchange relations which sustain
them and establish their interconnection, all ultimately owe their rationalisation
to the stories we tell ourselves, to our motivation by the key narratives of
our times. And these in turn owe their very possibility to the subversive
action of entropy. Furthermore, the narrative of the aesthetics of ruins, as a
mode of appropriation of the past, is itself, both product and use of entropy.
It is entropy that guarantees the possibility of the narrative behind the
aesthetics of ruins (for us and for the perceiving culture) and entropy that
causes the advent of the ruins themselves, the ruination of a society, of its
institutions, of its culture - if the tendency to decay is not repaired by a
labour reinvigourated by ritual.
The
foundation of narrative in irreversible decay: first irony of entropy.
Traces of Utopia in the relics of
the past: second irony of entropy.
Such a
love it is which gives hope whilst removing the ground for all hope. By turning
decay into rebirth, past into future, the ruin doubles the work of ritual. The
stagnant water of the marsh by evening becomes the clear water of dawn. The
product of entropy counters its source; the spring of appearances runs clear.
The gift of Maya stills the unquiet ocean of the Enlightenment.
Yet,
finally, is not the utopic re-projection of the past simply a soft-focus,
semi-secular, version of the same force that denigrated its achievements. For
taming the past, its civilisations and its myths, putting of them in their
proper place regarding the present and its systems of belief, then plotting
their course into the otherwise uncharted future, has all this not
traditionally belonged to the labour of religion? A labour achieved by burying
the roots of all things in the fecund soil of absence, time's exterior, the
sublime deixis which patiently guides all existence back to the guarantor of
eternity; ritual's promise, its irreducible core. The most secure foundations
are those that rest upon nothing (or upon an unsolvable mystery; as
contradictions in the world of signs point outwards to those contexts that give
them existence). Concealed behind the relentless (eternal) work of Nature (in
its demonic guise as entropy) it is religion which offers the canonic means of
comprehending the world and providing its vicissitudes with a palatable
explanation. Even if, surviving the death of god, it presents itself as its
rationalised reincarnation, ideology. The destructive workings of tides
commanded by an entropic moon, countered by the figures of creation written in
the sand, like the twin masks of Shiva, are combined into one. The result may be an anthropomorphic
God, the abstract divine of religion, or the science that guarantees a
law-governed Order; with physics as the new avatar of Nature - source and
seeker of the overarching definition of these forces. God as Sublime: God as
Metaset. Is there yet another name for God? A Second Nature. Whose face is it
that operates the invisible hand, making anew social institutions, civil
society, desire and identity? Whose the cycles of crisis that follow one
another in an ever rapid pulse of destruction and creation? The new Shiva.
Capitalism: the economics of entropy anticipated.
In
these ways, working in as many ways are there are ways of seeing the world,
contingent belief gathers behind itself the forces of the eternal (whether by
means of the angel, the balance, or the slide-rule). That which it must explain
is yoked behind the plough of authority (that which would explain). In this way
Culture becomes Nature, becomes Supernature; becomes (that which explains) the
Supernatural. The thing and the right to speak of it are confused in a trope
that underwrites all discourses on the eternal. It is therefore Religion
disguised as Nature that is the (hidden) operator behind the aesthetics of
ruins. (Religion) or that which stands in its place today, the dominant
ideological tropes of a epoch or culture, it is this that reclaims previous
cultures and glories in their submission to entropy (physical and social).
Reincorporating them through entropy, and not just appropriating and
maintaining the portion that suits its needs (as with Historicism, be it of
nineteenth century or post-modern provenance). Our submission to time masks a
submission to that which would speak in its place. Making old 'old', and not
just something incorporated or recycled. Rather made 'old' as the very
condition of its reincorporation, of its recycling. And then damned. All the
better to damn us. (And damned we catch a glimpse of the agent of our
condemnation, vaunting itself in its clandestinity, concealed among the folds
of the curtain of time).
Denial
as assertion: the final irony of Entropy. The supposed humbling of the present
by means of the spectacle of a degraded past. Yet this putative denial actually
reinforces the dominance of the present. Denial as means of assertion, as assertion
by other means. (Epoch, period, culture, belief, or self, all attain the positive through
the labour of this negative). The interpretation of ruins joins the history of
asceticism and its contribution to the history of the self.
Far
from being the arrogance of the past that is observed to temper the arrogance
of the present in the aesthetics of the ruin, it is rather the hubris of the
present that is reinforced by the belief in its own superiority over the past
and so to entropy itself. The present is, after all, 'the best of all possible
worlds', survivor of the social competition, front-runner of the race of
history, evolution's last word (so far). In truth the arrogance of the present
is not at all tempered as in previous versions of the aesthetics of ruins
(unless in the sense of tempering steel to make it stronger). Even in the past,
it was the arrogant fundamentalist excision, through the casting of the name of
heresy, of all contenders (past and present), that guarantied religion its pride
of place, underwrote its suffocating omni-presence, whilst hiding its hubris in
folds of piety. Religion, deferring to an absent god and so deferring to
no-one, waits in the place of the present; in the place of those present.
Religion reinstated, in a ritualistic reading of the past, reconfirming, as all
ritual must, the identity of its practitioners and their vaunted central place
in the cosmos. Religion as the face of the present. Even in its current guise
as ideology.
It is
therefore Entropy, the modern face of Fate, of Mutability, of Nature, and so of Time, which is the disfiguring
face behind the mask of time, the march of time (the masque of time). Guarantor
of meaning, in the world of signs or representation, of the unidirectionality
of narrative (of the inevitability at the heart of all genres from tragedy to
melodrama); in the world of energy of irreversibility of processes, the
guarantor of life (reversible processes of physics are made unidirectional by
the addition of chaos 'attractors' where a gradually emerging repetition
signals the direction of time). However entropy's most obvious manifestation is
as the lack of energy or labour spent rebuilding and renewing, as the lack of
time put aside for the maintenance and survival of given structures, as the
lack of rituals spent reinvigorating a culture and its identity. And therefore,
as the fate of architecture, an entity partaking in all these realms; a fate
ultimately leading to its degeneration and abandonment. This process is echoed
by the ideal and the utopic as the positive built upon this negative- as the
dream image, the subjunctive face of hope hovering over the chasm of the
indicative, blurring the grim reality of the ruin, of the truth of entropy -
time's last word.
Yet for us, here and now, no last
word but the next word.
The
ruin reveals to the watcher a war for the future that is being fought on two
fronts: yet on closer inspection the faces of the two spectral antagonists
merge unveiling the lineaments of the same metaphysical form. From one
viewpoint, a fainter, but fairer, aspect beckons, its wraith-like arm extended
towards the place of sunrise; the utopic subjunctive offers a redeemed world
somewhere just over the spatio-temporal horizon. The other vision manifests a
sterner aspect, its glassy eyes reflect the last light of sunset, an extended
index-finger points unambiguously upward; the rhetoric of submission will
control the future through the abasement of the past - the abjection of the
present follows (the over-eager reminder of our own mortality). Somewhere in
the maze of the ruin the path to the immediate future has been lost. The waiting stones and silent trees
offer only the denial of history and the pre-empting of anticipation. Can the
watcher of the ruin discern the light illuminating other pathways, ones
resisting the refraction of the ruin's prism into the hijack of memory and the
appropriation of personal hope?
The
sighing of the wind in the ruins sings, like all culture, like all
representation, the song of our fears for the future, a song of pain and its
recurrence; the entropy of the everyday - a theme endlessly reprised or present
as the echo of its absence. And now the ruin no longer resounds with the
distant glories (rhetorical or subjunctive) of the future in the past, the past
in the future. The song we now hear gives voice only to the future in the
present.
For the
ruin is a mirror, which like all mirrors not only reflects the likeness of
those that stand before it, but also, as we raise our eyes up away from the
surprise of recognition, as that which stands behind us.
Copyright 2002,
2005 Peter Nesteruk