The fascination that ruins exert stems from their distinctive aesthetic qualities and their special role in the ethical-psychic processes that underlie them . Ruins are generally disconnected from their original cultural context and belong to a partly de-cathected world [1] or more precisely a broken world characterized by loss and fragmentation. For the most part, that world belongs to the past. But what if it belongs to the future? One of the central tasks for writing history in the Anthropocene is to establish narratives that address the vast extents of geological time of Earth history along with the shorter durations of historical time.
In a short but striking essay of 1911, the German sociologist Georg Simmel described architectural ruins as a moment of peace between two antagonistic principles: the “upward striving” of the human spirit, and the “sinking downwards” of nature. Only in the architectural ruin does Simmel see decay as a defininng element of a specific art form. The other arts, including sculpture, can be damaged without configuring a new kind of work.
According to the Archaeologist Alain Schnapp, “The ruin is by definition unstable … it oscillates between materiality and immateriality, memory and oblivion, nature and culture. It is these three axes that give it a universal function”. (Une histoire universelle des ruines: des origines aux Lumières. La Librairie du XXIe siècle p.652, translation mine.)
Simmel explored one of these axes — nature vs culture — in both a material and aesthetic sense, particularly in relation to stones in buildings had been taken from nature, and would inevitably return to it. Schnapp sees ruins as a product of a tension between the material (what remains) and the immaterial (what once existed, is now lost, and must be recovered through the imagination). He considers that societies’ awareness of this last tension is best documented not through buildings, but through poems and similar reflections."But remains in the landscape are only ruins if someone—whether poet, historian, or archaeologist—recognizes them as evidence of human activity, which would otherwise be forgotten.*(italics mine) So ruins also emerge from the conflict between memory and oblivion. For Schnapp, ruins are ultimately not so much objects as processes implemented by societies in order to contemplate their place in history.
A vine grows through one of Cuba’s art schools from the 1960’s.
Climate change has been categorized as a "hyperobject"[2] to convey its characteristic challenge to the "here and now." You cannot point to climate change as an entity in time and space and say, "there is climate change." While one can point to a ruin as a discernable and bounded entity, ruination is similarly broader in application, and it takes on both natural and cultural forms.
Today, one of the many indicators of coastal ruination is the accelerated subsidence rate of the ground level due to the weight of high-rise building. Even as tall buildings continue to be built in cities like Miami or New York, the sea level is rising, and the ground level is sinking under the weight of building. Parts of Miami are sinking up to 1.5 centimeters a decade, adding to flood hazards om frequent tropical storms. But observations like these are not perceptible to the "naked" senses. They involve finely calibrated satellite data headlined in the newspapers by "The East Coast Is Sinking." While the sinking itself may be imperceptible, its consequences are not -- but an intellectual adjustment of causal perception remains necessary and has often been repeatedly called into doubt by interested parties.
In the global North, most of us can too easily put climate change out of mind, at least for now. (see cognitive dissonance)And even if climate change is occurring much sooner than we previously expected, the developed countries still express a helplessness -- in particular as to actively forestalling the changes that will otherwise be inevitable, according to basic physics.
[1] cathect: to invest with mental or emotional energy) (or more precisely a broken world characterized by loss and fragmentation.
[2] Timothy Morton