I’m Dr. Andrew Wood – with your introduction
to the City of Ruins.
By “Ruins,” I refer to the underside of
the “City of Tomorrow”: a response to
the rhetoric of progress we’ve explored
since reading William Gibson’s The Gernsback
Continuum.
In other words, what happens when the rhetorics
of rationality, efficiency, confidence, and
progress – values epitomized by planned
communities and neoliberalist economics, by
Walt Disney’s dream of a “Great Big Beautiful
Tomorrow” – cease to fulfill their promise?
Well, what happens is ruin, both as object
(“a ruin”) and as process (“to ruin”).
To my way of thinking, ruins are more than
places; they are messages: semiotic ghosts
– haunting our dreams of streamlined perfection.
Revealing the futility of monuments, ruins
can be powerful sites of rhetoric.
When we consider the topic of Historical Ruins,
we might reflect back upon the execution of
Socrates. In the Phaedo [61c-69e], an account
of Socrates’s thoughts on immortality, we
are reminded that philosophy is preparation
for death, a transformation that will free
us from our illusions.
Whoa. That’s pretty grim. But the potential
for our bodily ruin to liberate our spiritual
selves is also a positive thing – from a
certain point of view.
In Roman times, we are told that a general
given permission to march his armies into
the city, to celebrate his successes on the
battlefield, would have a slave sitting behind
him in his chariot, a human reminder, whispering
a message: memento mori, “Remember you must
die.”
This story is drawn mostly from the traditions
of Stoicism, and its historical accuracy is
in some doubt. But the point is to warn against
pride, against vanity.
We see this tradition inscribed in Ecclesiastes
in the Hebrew Bible: “Vanity of vanities,
says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All
is vanity.” Remember that vanity from this
perspective isn’t just a matter of staring
into mirrors; it is really about our focus
on ephemeral and meaningless things. The rhetoric
of ruins is therefore a call to recognize
the futility of human pride.
In my own research, I focus less on historical
ruins – places like Pompeii or Machu Pichu
or Angkor Wat – and more on Modern Ruins,
which some scholars define as TOADS: Temporary,
Obsolete, Abandoned, and Derelict spaces.
Modern ruins include economic ghost towns,
industrial accident sites, nuclear disaster
zones, environmental badlands, and even Zombie
Malls. You know, I teach an occasional graduate
seminar on Modern Ruins, which invites participants
to search out and explore these kinds of places
– so long as they remember the rules of
SLR: safety, legality, and respect.
While my earliest research focused on largely
forgotten and abandoned motels on the American
roadside, much of my recent work has brought
me to places ranging from the ghost town of
Bodie, California to the ravaged remains of
Fukushima, Japan, to a site in Turkmenistan
called the Door to Hell. During my journeys,
I’ve examined practices of so-called Dark
Tourism, sites associated with death, decay,
and danger.
One reality of Dark Tourism is a tendency
for visitors to approach these sites in a
manner that evokes the term “Ruin Porn,”
in which the pleasures of consumption occur
without the consideration of consequence.
That’s why I’m inspired by folks like
Tyree Guyton who work to transform places
such as the eastside of Detroit into artistic
exhibits.
By converting abandoned houses and other objects
into colorful art pieces, Guyton’s Heidelberg
Project seeks to attract tourists, but not
only to help them snap Instagram pix.
Unofficial tourist sites like the Heidelberg
Project challenge their visitors to contemplate
the intersecting political, economic, and
racial factors that produce places like Detroit,
and to contemplate their own complicity in
these productions.
I’ve also spent some time in Chernobyl,
Ukraine, site of the 1986 nuclear disaster,
and in the nearby former showcase city of
Pripyat. While striving to explore simple
questions – like “Why would anyone visit
a zone contaminated by nuclear radiation?”
– I find myself drawn to Michel Foucault’s
heterotopian framework.
Remember that one? We discussed Foucault in
the City of Gardens, and here he is again.
In this case, I find it useful to explore
Chernobyl from Principle 5 of the Foucauldian
framework, where the author writes, “Heterotopias
always presuppose a system of opening and
closing that both isolates them and makes
them penetrable.”
People are the same. And most folks prefer
to maintain some control over the openings
of their bodies, to avoid being penetrated
with – Oh, I don’t know – radioactive
contamination. And yet Chernobyl and Pripyat
are increasingly popular sites of Dark Tourism.
Sure, some tourists will obediently snap photos
of sculptures commemorating the over 600,000
liquidators who faced potential death in their
efforts to clean up the site, but you can
be positive that they’ll even more gleefully
post snaps of someone holding a radiation
detector to prove how close they got to a
hot spot - seeking proof of potential contamination.
In your notes, you might dedicate a paragraph
to the following question, “What is the
pleasure of Touristic Contamination in a place
like Chernobyl?”
One other way to study ruins in a course like
Rhetoric and Public Life is to analyze what
we might label Jeremiadic Ruins. Here I invite
you to recall our previous discussion of the
Jeremiad as a rhetoric of lament, of complaint,
of rebuke, that summons individuals to connect
their personal failings with collective suffering.
The traditional Jeremiad refers to places,
no doubt. John Winthrop’s Sermon on the
Arbella inspired its listeners to consider
carefully the literal vessel carrying them
to the New World (as they called it), to contemplate
its physical frailty: “The onely way to
avoyde … shipwracke [is to] walk humbly
with our God.”
I merely propose that the rhetoric of Jeremiadic
Ruin foregrounds material decay to motivate
changes in belief, attitude, value, or behavior.
Here’s an example: From Donald Trump’s
2017 inaugural address.
Here’s another example: From Mario Cuomo’s
1984 address to the Democratic National Convention.
As you study these excerpts, write a few sentences
to answer the following question: How does
the rhetoric of Jeremiadic Ruin work to influence
an audience?
Well, that’s your introduction to rhetorical
ruins. As you review your notes of how these
sites – these Temporary, Obsolete, Abandoned,
and Derelict spaces – can be used to speak
about debatable values and abandoned promises,
I want to remind you of something that performance
studies scholar Patrick Santoro wrote about
this topic – that “Ruin is more than barren
landscapes and decomposed architecture; it
is the emotional gravity of loss that exists
within us.”
He’s right. The remnants of places, the
detritus of progress, are ultimately about
the empty spaces we carry within us, the voids
that cannot be filled, no matter what we consume.
Haunting us, these semiotic ghosts serve as
dark reminders that all pleasures are fleeting,
and that anyone who advertises the permanence
of their power is selling a lie.
No doubt, this is the most dystopian of rhetorics.
But it is also liberating in a way, to recognize
the road to wreckage as a pathway to enlightenment.
Thus I thank you, truly, for allowing me to
serve as your tour guide, through the City
of Ruins.
