Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay

Siobhan Lyons

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319933894
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319933900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection is the first book to comprehensively analyse the relatively new and under-researched phenomenon of 'ruin porn'. Featuring a diverse collection of chapters, the authors in this work examine the relevance of contemporary ruin and its relationship to photography, media, architecture, culture, history, economics and politics. This work investigates the often ambiguous relationship that society has with contemporary ruins around the world, challenging the notions of authenticity that are frequently associated with images of decay. With case studies that discuss various places and topics, including Detroit, Chernobyl, Pitcairn Island, post-apocalyptic media, online communities and urban explorers, among many other topics, this collection illustrates the nuances of ruin porn that are fundamental to an understanding of humanity's place in the overarching narrative of history.

© The Author(s) 2018

Siobhan Lyons (ed.)Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decayhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93390-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene

Siobhan Lyons¹

(1)

Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Siobhan Lyons

Email: [email protected]

The original version of this chapter was revised: Grammatical error in the opening quote has been corrected. The erratum to this chapter is available at https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-319-93390-0_​13

End Abstract

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’

Frederic Jameson

Ruin porn is the new sublime. While terrifying mountainscapes defined the seventeenth century sublime , the twenty-first century has carved a new incarnation of the sublime, precariously located within contemporary ruins of the urban wild. We are enthralled by modern ruins for a plethora of reasons, not least because they inspire in us a rational paranoia that taps into our own eventual demise—both individual and, more importantly, collective. For modern ruins signal this global decay to which we all will invariably succumb, one way or another. In this manner, modern ruins arouse both despair and fascination, a fascination with our own death and a tangible image of the precise form it will take. They remind us, in a very sublime way, of the inevitability of human extinction, refocusing the terrain of ‘ruin’ away from the ancient world and towards the imminent future. Since the sublime was always acquainted in some way with the threat of death, its alliance with the notion of ruin porn is unsurprising and essential. Indeed, such images retain something of a Freudian death-drive (Thanatos).

We have been able to imagine the endtimes before, as is marked by the generous archives of art, music, and literature that approached how, when, or why the end will occur. But the very real presence of modern ruins—of buildings, houses, amusement parks and entire cities—goes one step further in solidifying and manifesting the narrative that we have imagined for hundreds of years. Death, and extinction, have become a reality.

This is why the term ‘ruin porn’—dubious and insufficient though it may be—is more accurate than, say, ‘ruin art’, because it is grounded and warehoused in obsession. The term also helps to explain a partial but wary acceptance of this ultimate fate, explaining why we don’t use the term ‘ruin fear’, seemingly a more logical term for the phenomenon. As sociologist Ernest Becker argues, death does not appear to be something that immediately causes concern in the everyday: ‘We can understand what seems like an impossible paradox: the ever-present fear of death in the normal biological functioning of our instinct of self-preservation, as well as our utter obliviousness to this fear in our conscious life’.¹ We don’t fear collective annihilation every day, even though we are conscious of the eventuality of our own demise. This curious predicament seemingly defines the human condition, and helps to explain and foreground the enduring captivation of decaying buildings and skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. This image of finality exists within our reach, but not completely. As I have previously argued,² ruin porn is so compelling precisely because it is a bewildering form of time travel to the future within the present. It allows us to view, as if in a museum, something uncompromisingly real and consequential, but without having to engage completely with the dire consequences it realistically provokes. It offers an image of our own death while we are still alive. In this sense, those who take photographs of ruin and those that are bewitched by them become voyeurs of their own lives within a fragile history. This helps to explain the psychical resonance of contemporary ruins; in such settings we see the fusion of time and space. As Walter Benjamin argues in The Origin of the German Tragic Drama: ‘In the ruin, history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of eternal life so much as that of irresistible decay’³

Ruin porn is also, in this manner, an expression against the thoroughly anthropocentric discourse that pervades contemporary culture. The term Anthropocene —one as insufficient and potentially ambiguous as ruin porn—circulates around a new human-centeredness, a reassertion of a humanist kind of thinking that once again fails to capture the severity and complexity of existence. Said to follow the Holocene, the Anthropocene is defined by humanity’s irreversible impact upon the earth, an ironic development that has, in itself, threatened the survival of the human species. Climate change is at once driven by humanity and will cause humanity’s collective extinction. As Elizabeth Kolbert observes, ‘The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but “one weedy species”’⁴

At the same time, others have found this anthropocentric discourse useful. As Joanna Zylinska argues: ‘it would be hard to deny that the Anthropocene thesis is almost a perfect antidote to the politics of the status quo: it is also the first science-based account of the death of the postindustrial capitalism of the globalised world—as well as the death of that world’⁵. Postcapitalism and posthumanism thus merge, with the collapse of our buildings signalling the potential end of a humanist, capitalistic driven manner of ‘life’. The images of overgrowth in capitalistic sites thrust us into both a prehistoric and futuristic mentality simultaneously, whereby humanity’s influence is bested, removed, and rendered obsolete in favour of organic, botanical life not beholden to human history or culture.

These sites are disturbing not only because they threaten the illusion of human invincibility, but because they also threaten the prevailing reign of capitalism . As Frederic Jameson shrewdly noted, ‘it is far easier to imagine the end of the world, rather than the end of capitalism’. But ruin porn confronts both of these matters in a single gesture. The end of capitalism thus evokes the end of the world. When we see our buildings collapse—particularly prematurely—it signals the fragility of capitalism, something which is inexorably intertwined with the demise of human civilisation. Humanity thus becomes inseparable from the products it has produced. Indeed, as scholar Jason McGrath reminds us: ‘The posthuman gaze at modernist ruins reminds us that, no matter how many new objects we produce, consume, and discard, those objects will in many cases far outlive us and the purposes to which we put them’.⁶ The presence of a decaying building, therefore, ushers in a terrifying but arresting way of viewing our own demise as something imminent, rather than ultimately imaginary.

But this is not to suggest, Zylinska says, ‘that we should all therefore just sit back and wait for extinction to happen, or extinguish all hope for material and political change in the near term, contemplating ruin porn while wallowing in our own transience’.⁷ And there is certainly a tendency to wallow in and succumb to complete despair. But Zylinska argues that ‘extending the temporal scale beyond that of human history by introducing the horizon of extinction can be an important first step in visualising a post-neoliberal world here and now’,⁸ and this is precisely what contemporary ruins engender. In this sense, ruin porn becomes a useful method through which to approach the finality of humanity by removing death somewhat from the terrain of the imaginary, and forcing it into reality. No longer is the apocalypse reserved for the future, but becomes part of the here and now. As Tong Lam asserts, ‘in a way, we are already post-apocalyptic’.⁹

As a concept, ruin porn has been notably and deservedly criticised for its tendency towards exploitation and the trivialisation of economic struggle and decay. Detroit-based photographer and Sweet Juniper blogger, James D. Griffioen, who is noted as having coined the term ruin porn, notes that locals in Detroit dislike the arrival of ‘outsider’ photographers, who photograph the same sites over and over with their professional cameras. According to Griffioen, the photographers write the same stories, and revel in the misguided belief that they have ‘revealed’ the extent of Detroit’s ruin to the world.¹⁰ This indicates why the term ‘porn’ has been associated with ruin, since the practice of ruin photography has become tied up in the politics of artistic validation and reputation.

Both Dora Apel and Richard B. Woodward have pointed out the issues with the term ruin porn; they point to the ‘whiff of exploitation ’ that the term provokes; photographers are often criticised for capitalising on the images of ruin from which they themselves are somewhat immune or indifferent. As Woodward argues: ‘by linking a subject to an erotic genre calculated to excite us with a stock set of provocative fantasies, inventors or adopters of these compound nouns can also claim to be doctors of the postmodern soul, identifying unnoticed and insidious tropes in our glutinous diet of images’.¹¹ Yet he observes that ‘to condemn images of blasted lives and places that carry a whiff of “exploitation or detachment” would be to do away with a sizeable chunk of pictorial and written history’.¹² Apel , too, notes that while ruin photography ‘may be instrumentalised for ideological purposes by the state, they may also serve as forms of historical witnessing and potential tools for resistance’.¹³ Woodward discusses the long tradition in Western art of romanticising decay, from the Renaissance to Romanticism. He argues that there is a degree of safety in viewing such destruction: ‘World event...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Ruin Porn, Capitalism, and the Anthropocene
• Part I. American Ruin
• Part II. Photographic Ruin
• Part III. Alternative Ruinscapes
• Part IV. Virtual and Mediated Ruin
• Erratum to: Ruin Porn and the Obsession with Decay
• Back Matter