Revisiting "The Aesthetics of Decay"

With space and time now open, I am able to think through Aurelio Madrid’s review of The Aesthetics of Decay with the attention it deserves. Given that I have not thought about urban ruins nor decay for a few years, some of the ideas that Madrid deals with are themselves fairly fresh to me. This is a good thing: it amplifies the strengths and weaknesses of the book with greater clarity. It is also a vaguely uncanny experience re-exploring these ideas, given that for me, they are as much bound with personal circumstances as they are abstract concepts themselves. Each chapter is a vessel of memory, a different way of responding to the same experience. I would even say that everything in this book, for all its “ambition,” is essentially a response to the experience of holding a suitcase in one’s hand while having no place in particular to go.

Interestingly, since 2006, the topic of decay has grown, now assimilated in a broader theoretical environment. Much of this leaves me cold and affirms what the book warns against: the Romantic appropriation of decay to fulfil a particular human need. This is as evident in the politics of decay as it is in the employment of decay in conjunction with the words “blackened,” “dark,” “Lovecraftian,” and “speculative” – all words that are in danger of becoming boring, interchangeable, and affixed to a gloss of sterile “beauty.” In each of these instances, decay has become fetishized by a co(s)mic vision decidedly remote from unromantic reality of physiological decay (Notably, somewhere [I cannot remember where] Schopenhauer warns us against aestheticising the world by spending time in a hospital). To be sure, while architectural decay certainly affords an “aesthetic distance,” enabling one to gaze toward the world from afar, the rot of the human body is of a different order. As a book, The Aesthetics of Decay is incapable of attending to this pressing human situation, which requires an altogether different approach where aesthetics plays no part.

Thus, Madrid is right to suggest that I want to stay clear of an “advocacy of ruins as places to be restored, adored & monumentalized.” It is precisely that veneration of decay that seems to be taking place in today’s philosophical landscape. And this is problematic for the reason that veneration confers a monumental quality to decay, and the philosophical value of decay is its resistance against representation and stasis. In concrete terms, this would mean conferring a value upon ruins in advance of experiencing them, so deploying them as token gestures of an already established aesthetic. For this reason, in The Aesthetics of Decay, ruins are not mentioned until the reader gets to the 100th page or so.

In this respect, decay is actually a side-effect of the book’s real concern: the experience of nothingness, which as Madrid, notes, is to be approached in a dialectic of silence and presence. My concern in this book is the dynamic experience of nothingness, a felt experience that seems to point to both a micro and macro-cosmic level. A nothingness full of contrasts, swirling voids, and banal plateaus – banal because it is only in the context of everydayness that nothingness has value, not in an aestheticized cosmic dystopia. Sartre was right, therefore, to situate nothingness in cafés and so forth, but his situatedness is structural and fails to incorporate the specific spatiality of the café into his account.

Similarly, Heidegger’s account of nothingness remains incomplete for the reason it neglects the microcosmic realm. Heidegger’s conflation of nothingness and anxiety is unconvincing, and will remain so, so long as embodied experience is left on the wayside. Reading through Madrid’s review, I am reminded of the body’s lack of presence in my own book. So far as the phenomenological descriptions of nothingness go, they tend to focus more on the visual perception of spatiality than on their corporal reality. Smells, sounds, and the sensuous touch of materiality are mentioned, but they are invariably subordinated to the sheer sight of ruination. Like much writing from the past, the omission is an oddity from the present.

“Trigg discerns a palpable silence as having a distinctly mournful quality & from this mournful quality we are urged to utilize memory, as a method of understanding an access point to the experienced ruin at hand.” Madrid is right. Mourning is a privileged mood, inasmuch as it links one realm to another. In turn, this establishes a liminal realm that is neither present nor absent. Mourning sets in place an attunement to the Heideggerian Nothing, thus involving the totality of the remembering self.

“So for Trigg, we should see a Bergsonian memory as bifurcated & dualistic. This dualism causes memory to place itself outside of a timely measured vantage, to then place pure memory away from its habitual comfort into a kind of exile, where the habit memory & the pure memory do not match-up.” Madrid again does a wonderful job of clearing up my verbose writing. I have not surmounted the problem this passage presents us with, namely: to what extent does a Bergsonian account of time present a challenge to our self-consciousness experience of time? I detect estrangement in the Bergsonian durée, a kind of melancholy weight that does less to unite the self and more to divide it.

And the estrangement establishes a logic of nostalgia, as Madrid puts it: “The impossibility of rectifying a glorified past becomes a glaring revenant of the ruin, because the ruin’s past could also be idealized to a revivified fault of never matching the present. With nostalgia, the present is deficiently reflected in the ruin.” Madrid clearly identifies the movement of micro to macrocosm that runs through the book, from the singular to the general. Why is nostalgia so important? Because I claim that experiences only have a unity in their receding absence, when they are sufficiently close to the present but at the same time already expired. Given this structural importance, nostalgia also folds over into the future, creating a pre-emptive nostalgia that overrules the discontinuities of the present. Nothing is immune from this logic, not even the writing of nostalgia itself.

The problem of nostalgia – as irresolvable as the other problems in the book – takes place on a cultural level, manifest above all in moribund remains of postmodernity: “Lyotard sought to answer a theme of relativism by reaching for micro-narratives that vie for hierarchy on their own accord & enabling the decentered world of post-modernity.” As we know, postmodernism is an impasse, marking a strange presence that even writing about it now I can’t be sure if what I’m writing about is merely the cultural residue or a more defined philosophy. In any case, Madrid summarises: “It is suggested that the Dadaists were for Trigg, purer in their chaotic agenda because they didn’t seek a re-positioning of an ‘epistemological foundationalism’ as did Lyotard. Surprisingly we have Dada’s defiant insouciance obviated away from any of its philosophical responsibilities.” This sets in place a historical struggle to negotiate with the dissolution of reason, where “reason” refers to a tendency toward assimilating the past into the preset with no remainders therein. Madrid puts it better than me: “We are shown an idea that rationality has a claim to permanency & order. Reason in the shadow of decay is transient. Rationality doesn’t always neatly allow for the un-pure ruin, entropy & eventual decline. That reason ‘should’ flourish is what the ruin contradicts, a ruin stands as a testament for the irrational & the soon to be post-rational.”

And so we get to part two, the aesthetic analysis of ruins. As Madrid indicates, the movement from a historical argument to a phenomenological one is a little bit Hegelian in fashion. Hegel’s aesthetic relies on the idea that the “spirit” of a dynamic culture expresses itself in surface form through aesthetic artefacts. This is an attractive idea, and one that I try to bring to urban ruins in the early 21st century. If I may be as distasteful as to quote myself: “Aesthetic contemplation of the decayed object will allow the progressive nature of decline to resound.” This is the idea in any case.

Madrid does a good job of outlining the philosophical history of decay that I plot in the opening of part two, which finally settles on the Symbolists who fascinates both Madrid and myself in equal measure (a shame I was not familiar with Leon Spilliaert when I wrote the book, as he would have proved inspirational). Madrid writes: “The Symbolists are usually peripheral to the Impressionists of the same time, due to their love of the mythic/mystic underbelly of culture, with its themes of silence, solitude, death &c. These motifs pervade an artistic range of vision marked by severity, the unknowable, the mysterious, and the bizarrely affected.” The importance of the Symbolists is contained in their use of nostalgia as a weapon against modernity. The flight into imagination takes shape in the memory, establishing a mood that absorb decline as a motif to be aesthetically revered.

A shift takes place in the 10th chapter owning to a break in the writing, and a more explicitly phenomenological approach is advanced. “A sense of place is never really forgotten & the possible reading of space as reflected by our remembering of home as place, is a feature of what place is. When we are thrust into a space that is ruinous, it’s in contrast to our home. Experience brings about a displacement of space within Trigg’s ruin that challenges us in a spatially unfamiliar way.” Madrid has it right, but on hindsight, my formulation between space and place is in the wrong. The reason being, I rely on a dualistic, causal relation between space and place, framing the former as homogenous and the latter as heterogeneous. The same can also be said of my use of Casey’s “site,” which despite my acceptance of it here has become a major source of criticism for me. In the book, I don’t think too much hinges on this dualisms between space and place, or site and place, and I am hardly concerned about general inconsistencies between this book and other bits of work (see here for an indication of my distance from the spatial model used in the book, all of which is expanded in the next book to a much greater extent).

By the time of chapter 11, I attempt to apply my analysis of runs to the sublime directly: “Kant’s sublime openly discards the beautiful, & the beautiful is seen by Trigg as holding itself up in utter exhaustion in today’s contemporary art practices. Trigg would do well to write about the current art-world with its numerous manifestations of un-reason & its open mocking of rationality. Trigg’s ‘absence of reason’ & his notions of the ‘post-sublime’ could effortlessly be carried over to post-millennial art appreciation.” Thanks for the suggestion, I will certainly explore some of those avenues in the current art-world. In fact, along with Kancheli’s use of musical space, Gregor Schneider seemed (the past tense might be important, as he seems now to be nothing more than a marketing machine for some vacuous drivel), exceptional in his creation of the sublimity of irrational space.

Madrid’s response to the chapters on the alleyway and staircases is appreciated. I warm to this part of the book quite a bit. In particular, the alleyway chapter, I think, does a good job of attending to the dynamism between intimacy and immensity, to paraphrase Bachelard. “The use of the alley as a designated space for the discarded allows us to see it as a space for the salacious. The alley is a marker for what is not meant to be seen aesthetically.” In many ways, this is where phenomenology excels – in its ability to discern structures of experience from the overlooked details of everyday experience. “Clearly for Trigg the stoop is fraught with memory.” Very true, and it appears once more in The Memory of Place, a formative place which I cannot seem to leave behind.

The final two chapters are an attempt at bringing together phenomenology with critical history. Madrid: “Where does one go after the fragmentation & undermining of rational progress?” To the question of how we ought to live beside ruins. What follows is an ethic of forgetfulness, an ecology of non-human centeredness, in which process takes precedence, thus challenging the Heideggerian emphasis on dwelling. In the final analysis, this is the value of ruins, as Madrid puts it lucidly: “Memories, remembering, nostalgia, forgetting & memorializing are of principle concern for understanding Trigg’s ruins. Memory imbricates with time in the temporal ruin. Rational thinking wants to place the memory into a neat linearity that excludes unreasonable anomalies such as the forgotten structure.” The final thesis is a plea to a Nietzschean re-evaluation of the use of history, a re-evaluation that is facilitated by the ruin as a manifest expression of the shape of history, to phrase it in the language of the book.

I thank Madrid for his review. His exposition of the book’s ideas is gratifying to read, and all the more so given that those ideas are received with enthusiasm. It is also strangely enjoyable re-experiencing the ideas of the book, now surrounded in their own halo of nostalgia. Despite the relative lack of temporal distance between writing the book and revisiting it, distance intervenes and those ideas are now placed in an era that is inaccessible and remote.