The City Remembers Itself:
Towards a Critical Aesthetic Through Detroit’s Urban Collapse
***
Yvette M. Granata
University of Amsterdam
Research Master’s Thesis in Media Study
Department of Media Study
Supervisor: Prof. Marie-Aude L. Baronian
Second Reader: Prof. Christoph Lindner
“The city is redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind. […]
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The City Remembers Itself: Towards a Critical Aesthetic Through Detroit’s Urban Collapse Yvette M. Granata
University of Amsterdam RMA Thesis: Media Study
Word Count: 23, 719
Abstract
The city has historically been a key site for cultural memory. Monuments and sites of commemoration attest to and remind of local and national events. In the 20th century,
media technologies have re-organized the sites and practices of cultural memory, causing critics to lament the loss of historical consciousness in part due to the pressure of
increasingly growing and globalized media. The ‘crisis of history’ has been tied to the ‘globalized city’ in critical media discourse, such as in those theories that seek to name the zeitgeist of postmodern conditions, of networked cultural memory practices, and the cultural logic of global contemporary media (Frederick Jameson, Arjun Appadurai, and Andreas Huyssen). If however, in the 20th century the city was marked by growth,
utopian designs of the future and the formation of networked economies, then the 21st
century city is marked by crisis and collapse, political upheaval, and precarious futures. How have the negotiations of history and cultural memory as tied to ‘the city’ thus changed in the 21st century? In order to explore this, I turn to mine one type of
contemporary city and its emergent media and art practices. Instead of looking to the increasingly growing and networked global city, I turn to its shadow: to a late-capitalist site of urban disjunction, the city of Detroit. ‘The City Remembering Itself’ traces media art practices connected to the city of Detroit in order to explore emergent aesthetic practices of cultural memory that this city and its artists have to offer.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...5
1.1 FROM HARLEM TO NOW...5
1.2 AIM...7
1.3 STRUCTURE AND METHODOLOGY...9
1.4 SITUATING THE PRESENT: FROM EMPIRE TO ENTROPY...11
2. CULTURAL MEMORY, AESTHETICS, & CRISIS OF HISTORY...13
2.1 RETRO-MANIA: AMNESIA, HOMELESSNESS, AND DISPOSSESSION...14
2.2 THE HAUNTED: LAMENTATIONAND NEUROSIS...19
2.3 NEO-ROMANTICAND NOWHERE...23
2.4 DISCUSSION...26
2.4.1 Defining Developmental Tendencies...27
3. NOT NOW, NOT HERE: THE RUINS OF DETROIT...30
3.1 DETROIT: TELOS AND DETROIT HISTORY...31
3.1.2 A Brief History of Detroit...31
3.1.3 Detroit and Wider Criticism...34
3.2 NOT NOW, NOT HERE: DETROIT RUIN PORN...36
3.3 A NEW PARADOX...41
3.3.1 Aesthetic Patterns & A New Criticism...43
3.3.2 Towards a New Rumination...45
4. NOW AND HERE: DETROIT AND THE ART OF OLD HOUSES...47
4.1 THE MOBILE HOMESTEAD...48
4.1.2 The Here and Now of a Memory-House: Against Forgetting...50
4.1.3 The Aesthetic Logic of the Vector: A Suture of History...51
4.1.4 Anisotropic Suture...53
4.2 THE HEIDELBERG PROJECT...55
4.2.1 A Different Site...58
4.2.2 The Non-Monument...59
4.3 THE PIONEERS...61
4.3.1 Suture as the Logic Itself...64
4.3.2 The Non-Map...65
4.4 ARTICULATING A DEFINITION FOR A CITY REMEMBERING ITSELF...66
5. CONCLUSION: THE GLOBAL STAGE AND NOTES FOR THE FUTURE...69
5.1 ON A GLOBAL STAGE FOR THE FUTURE...71
WORKS CITED...74
INTRODUCTION ***
1.1 From Harlem to Now
In his essay, ‘Harlem is Nowhere,’ Ralph Ellison describes that “to live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter underfoot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin” (Ellison, 2). Ellison’s
description is both a detail of the physical landscape, of the landmarks and garbage in the streets, and of the socio-political conditions of African American life in the 1940s in New York. In explaining the ethos of the neighborhood, Ellison goes on to explain that “in Harlem the reply to the greeting, “How are you?” is often, “Oh, man, I’m nowhere” – a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it is reduced to a gesture” (4). That Harlem is labeled as ‘nowhere’ by its denizens was an effect of the impossibility to link the social conditions of African Americans in Harlem to the surrounding conditions of the rest of Manhattan. The name of the neighborhood, its location, its place on the time-line of ‘progress,’ did not match or link to the historical conditions of the rest of the city. For the people to say that Harlem ‘is nowhere’ points to such a rift, “an argument in progress between black men and white men” where the white “impose interpretations upon the negro experience” and where the black men “drift in a capricious reality” (6). Thus in Harlem, instead of looking to the history book or to the narratives told, the person in Harlem need not look to history at all but merely look around at the neighborhood streets themselves. The history of the African American was plainly visible to the person living in Harlem. In not naming it, but instead gesturing towards the neighborhood itself, the sentiment is then made clear, “the concrete conditions of their lives are more real than the white man’s arguments”(6). When Ellison tells us that “Harlem is nowhere” and “Harlem is a ruin,” he aptly provides us, not with a narrative, but a description of the historical
social conditions embedded in the landscape of its sidewalks. Harlem, in Ellison’s prose, is therefore a ‘city that remembers itself.’
In the middle of the 20th century, theoretical discourse on cultural memory,
historical consciousness, and postmodern culture took a turn to focus on marginalized histories and the critique of ‘grand narratives.’1 Postcolonial theory, for example, aimed
“to transcend the marginalization of non-Western literatures in the canon” and to provide a new framework for historical analysis (Chibber, 2). As such, postcolonial theory aimed to give voice to the under-represented voices – to the oppressed and the invisible,
opening history to a field of multiple histories and adding more inclusive narratives to our collective memories. Looking to Ellison’s work, his observations may invite a reading of his essay as an example of such critique. He indeed offers explicit criticism of historical grand narratives (“the white man’s arguments”), and articulates the suppression of black voices. Yet at the same time, he also paints a complex field of relations within Harlem, one that details a candid experience on the exposed urban sidewalk in the ‘first world’2,
where “one ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze” and where the African American is in “perpetual alienation in the land of his birth”(Ellison, 5). In describing the aspects of alienation within one’s city – and observing the landscape at the same time that he offers a socio-political critique– Ellison widens the method of critique to encompass both unheard voices and an analysis of the practices (gestures) and imaginaries (‘nowhere’) that reflect the social conditions of the lived urban space.3
More than an example of postcolonial critique, I look to Ellison’s writing specifically for his description of Harlem as nowhere. His focus on Harlem’s ‘nowhere-ness’ is not only productive in surfacing an invisible history of a people, but also goes further by describing the visibility of a toxic urban reality – the manner in which one’s 1 Jean-Francois Lyotard named ‘the end of grand narratives’ the beginning of the postmodern era, in which the ‘grand narrative’ refers to the modernist idea of a teleological history of progress. See The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984
2 Subaltern studies, stemming from postcolonial theory, also seeks a ‘ground-up’ approach to history, however is primarily focused on the ‘invisible’ global South as opposed to a first world urban ruin, such as Harlem.
3 Henri Lefebvre put forth an analysis of ‘spatial alienation’ in his book The Production of Space in 1974, a key text in establishing the ‘spatial turn’ in social sciences and cultural theory. Ralph Ellison’s essay ‘Harlem is Nowhere,’ was written in 1948, and published widely by Harper’s magazine in 1964, thus proceeding Lefebrve’s work by 26 years. While Ellison’s description does not draw on or respond to Lebfebvre’s work, it touches upon its theme.
everyday life can be placeless, where ‘nowhere-ness’ signifies an expression of a crisis state, and where “one’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable” (Ellison, 5). Such description does not offer a narrative of historical events, but more so gives a description of the complex fabric of an internal historical crisis. What escapes other modes of critique is thus the treatment of urban decay that Ellison’s work observes – that the experience of an urban life marked by oppressive conditions can be historicized by its claim to a paradox, a visible ‘nowhere-ness.’ His description of Harlem in this way is the description of a depleted internal state – of an urban black hole in plain sight in a first world metropolis, a vortex inside an American dream town. What I claim, thus, is that the description of ‘nowhere-ness’ on a Harlem sidewalk is not a narrative of an unseen history, but a history of the visibly deplete. Such is what I seek to keep in mind moving beyond the 1940s to now, to the urban decay of a contemporary American ‘ghetto’ – the city of Detroit.
1.2 Aim
In aesthetic and cultural media discourse of recent decades, discussions related to ‘crisis’ have often turned to that of the ‘crisis of history.’ Across many theorists’ works, the ‘crisis of history’ has been often theorized alongside the conditions of the
contemporary ‘globalized city.’ In the work of Frederick Jameson, for example, the crisis of an ‘historical amnesia,’ goes in tandem with the spread of late capitalist neoliberal logic, recycled in the aesthetic logics of media.4 In the work of Arjun Appadurai, histories
became negotiated between the local and the global, or the ‘glocal,’ in increasingly expanded realms of global imaginaries through networked media spheres.5 In the work of
Andreas Huyssen, the interaction of the past and present in urban sites of
memorialization, or ‘urban palimpsests’, takes stage in global cities like Berlin and New York, cities that have had to create public memorials for historical events for both a local
4 Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. (original article published 1984)
5 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
and a globally dispersed population. In all of these discursive works, we can say that the common thread is the condition of a healthy neoliberal globalization, and that such conditions have threatened histories. As such, the 20th century city has been marked in the
discourse as a place to analyze the negotiation of histories, to look at where history may or may not be threatened due to expansion.
In the past decade, the ethos of the 21st century city has taken a turn. While
neoliberal globalization and the conditions of the Global city have not dwindled but continue to grow, the shadow of the Global city has also fully emerged. Across the world currently, cities are increasingly marked by crisis and collapse, and by a growing
condition of precarity and internal combustion. As Lieven De Cauter recently put forth in his work, we are no longer in the age of the expanding ‘Empire,’ but have entered into an era of a “new world disorder” – an ‘Entropic Empire’ in an age of disaster.6 The currently
unanswered questions for media and aesthetic discourse is therefore: in what way is history and cultural memory negotiated in the city, not in globalization’s expansion, but amid its collapse?7 And what new politics of art and cultural memory practices can be
articulated through an analysis of art works created within a city in crisis and amid visible collapse?
In order to explore this, I turn to look at the media and the art movements surrounding a 21st century city in crisis, to the post-Fordist ghetto of America: Detroit. I
look to Detroit for its markings of highly visible collapse, its pervasive post-industrial decay, extreme wealth gap, and visible socio-political degradation – and ask a series of questions of our current media culture: What is at stake when the ‘crisis of history’ is no longer a question of forgetting, but of recognizing a history constituted by its visible loss? As opposed to the traces of loss, what of the pervasive visibility of neglect or the salient tangibility of disintegration? Instead of the threat of forgetting, as with the neoliberal conditions of expansion, what of history when the ideological promise made by the state is not growth, but depletion and annihilation? It seems that it is no longer the threat of forgetting history that is at stake in the post-millennial decade, but also the manner with 6 Lieven De Cauter, Entropic Empire: On the City of Man in the Age of Disaster (2013)
7 Throughout this text, I will use ‘cultural memory’ and ‘history’ interchangeably, taking up Andreas Huyssen’s notion that “the form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national histories within borders” (Huyssen, 4). In this way, both terms ‘history’ and ‘memory’ apply to past events, but not as tied to a particular, ‘official’ or national identity.
which to approach a visible brokenness, the method for articulating that which is
disintegrating.
Approaching the history of a visibly broken landscape, I thus claim, induces the need for an articulation of a new critical paradigm to approach cultural memory and aesthetics in the age of rising urban collapse. In order to explore the articulation of such, I ultimately aim to put forth the appearance of a recursive process: ‘the city remembering itself’ – when the city itself, such as the physical layout of the sidewalk, becomes
entwined with the aesthetic logic of artworks – or becomes a necessary element of the
work – and thus a part of art practices. As described by Ralph Ellison of 1940s Harlem, the denizens embedded in a toxic urban condition are in perpetual awareness of the conditions of their times. As such, history becomes folded into their gestures. They need not look to the narrative of history, but merely gesture towards the streets. Such gestures are not restricted to a silent movement of the hand, but may also be a part of any act of making artworks and media practices. I therefore look at art practices as gestures, and as Ellison describes of the gestures of jazz musicians working in the basements of Harlem. The musicians of Harlem made their art in order to explore “the source of their
frustrations in the sickness of the social order” (Ellison, 12). I thus ultimately turn to look at the media and art of a city that is a contemporary emblem of ‘ruin’ as the grounds for my case study – the Motor City, Motown, the former Fordist Empire, now the poorest city in America – Detroit.8 My aim is thus to ultimately explore in what ways the city’s
artists negotiate history, and what new political demands of art and cultural memory practices can be articulated through the city’s collapse.
1.3 Structure and Methodology
The structure of this thesis will be divided into three main sections. In the first section, I will discuss the background literature related to cultural memory and history in discourse on media, aesthetics and the effects of globalization from the turn of
postmodernity to today. 9 My aim with this section is to chart the background and 8 To be fully transparent at the outset, I was born in Detroit.
9 When using the terms ‘postmodernity’ and ‘postmodernism,’ I will follow Frederick Jameson’s definition of postmodernity as a periodizing concept (after modernity, roughly after industrialization of the global
development of discourse and aesthetic trends that grew in connection to globalization, such as those related to nostalgic retro-media, from the 1980s to today, in order to bracket their cultural logics as embedded in the spatio-temporal logic of neoliberal globalization. Looking to the work of Walter Benjamin in the end of the first section, I will discuss the process of charting the development of aesthetic practices as a part of the necessary step towards articulating possible breaks for a new era. In the second section of this thesis, I turn specifically to the city of Detroit in order to further my analysis of the aesthetics tied to the logic of globalization, and how analyzing a specific type of media surrounding Detroit can further highlight the need for criticism of globalization logic infused in our current media and art culture. In this section, I firstly give a brief introduction to the history of Detroit, and how the city poses a different situation for historical ‘timelines.’ Secondly in this section, I then turn to an analysis of the contemporary aesthetic trend of ruin photography, or ‘ruin porn,’ in order to further point out where the current paradigm of aesthetic logics tied to the logic of globalization are in need of further criticism. Lastly, in the third section of the project, I turn to an analysis of the art and media works of artists in the city of Detroit and how their treatment of the city’s history and cultural memory offer a different aesthetic logic. In doing so, my aim will be to articulate the aesthetics of the contemporary city in collapse as aiming at the difficult task of surfacing a history of a historical brokenness, or of connecting the histories of disintegrations. I will conclude with the manner in which a history of disintegration can be a used as critical practice for the post-millennial decade, as a practice that I call a ‘city remembering itself.’ Lastly, I will return to discuss the notion of a ‘city that remembers itself,’ and what it may imply for how it may play a role in the global context.
1.4 Situating the Present: From Empire to Entropy
North and after Colonialism), and ‘postmodernism’ as a description of the art historical period (Andy Warhol, John Cage) and description of postmodern thought (Neoliberal capitalism) and criticism (Postcolonialism, Feminism).
In the early 1990’s Saskia Sessen coined the term the ‘Global City.’ This term was an articulation of globalization processes tied to the ascendance of neoliberal policies, to deregulation and privatization that grew in tandem with new technology. At the time of Sessen’s work, diverse reconfigurations of national territories were
increasingly fueled by growing technology coupled with strategic financial market openings across the globe. One world, one market, free enterprise, global exchange, economic growth – the buzz words of neoliberalism – were then increasingly heightened through the boom of techno-communications. Sessen posed the ‘global city’ as a
contemporary condition, a result of an “unbundling” or “weakening” of the national due to neoliberal policies, where both the ‘sub-national’ (the city) and where the ‘supra-national’ (the global digitized markets and free trade blocs) co-mingled in a manner that reduced the primacy of the national (Sessen, 27). I pose Sessen’s definition of the ‘global city’ here in order to envelope the context of critical media theories that have centered around late capitalist postmodernity and the conditions of globalization, such as the work of Frederick Jameson, Arjun Appadurai, and Andreas Huyssen – theorists who have contributed to current critical discourse on the relationship between media aesthetics, history, collective memory, and urban life. Looking at where they begin their analysis, we can see that the global city is the condition of their analysis. Arjun Appadurai, for example, describes that “today’s world involves interactions of a new order and
intensity,” putting forth his theory of ‘modernity at large’ and the role of the imaginary in global media across multiple ‘scapes’ that operate beyond national borders (Appadurai, 27). In introducing his analysis of postmodern aesthetics, Frederick Jameson expresses, “I want here to sketch a few of the ways in which the new postmodernism expresses the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism”, and that the “the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism” (Jameson, 3, 11). And lastly, Andreas Huyssen offering his notion of ‘present pasts,’ traces an ever-growing ‘memory culture’ that has abounded with globalization and an ever-spreading globalized media culture that seems to produce an obsession with memorializing. Despite the diverse critiques and insights of these writers, one thing is consistent: their critique is grounded in the same ethos that Sessen describes – the rise of late-capitalist expansion, the seemingly endless
horizon of market-mingling and uninhibited capitalist growth spread through ever-expanding borders.
In the last decade, however, there has been a break in the ethos of the neoliberal boom, and recent turns in scholarship seek to analyze the current moment – to look at the late capitalist malfunctions, or ‘crisis’, of the post-millennial era. Although still
embedded and overlapping with the persistence of neoliberal expansion – this era is increasingly marked with economic halt and collapse. While the aforementioned theorists’ critical offerings and analyses remain valid as neoliberal expansion has not disappeared, their analyses are nonetheless tied to its expanding side, as opposed to its collapsing underbelly. This underbelly is part of the contemporary climate that is increasingly marked with instability, economic fall-out, dissent, and a precarious socio-political climate. Indeed, as Rob Horning in the New Inquiry has recently pointed out, “the word precarity is becoming increasingly fashionable as a way of describing the effects of neoliberal policy. The concept expresses the sense that the state has broken its ideological promise”10. In an article from 2011, Judith Butler likewise points to instability
and precarity, stating that “in a time in which people are losing their homes, their
pensions, and their prospects for work in increasing numbers, we are faced with the idea that some populations are disposable” (Butler, 1). Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi in his 2011 book
After the Future, provides a run-down of the instability of the current moment, “the
vertiginous zero zero decade has changed our views and our landscape in an astounding way. From the dotcom crash to September 11th 2001, from the criminal wars of the Bush
administration to the near collapse of the global financial economy, the recent history of the world has been marked by shocking events and surprising reversals”(Berardi, 12). While the precarity and instability of the current era of crisis are well known and
articulated, the way in which the cultural logic of such can provide insight into our media culture and aesthetic practices is still an area requiring a more detailed chart.
2. CULTURAL MEMORY, AESTHETICS, & CRISIS OF HISTORY: Tracing Aesthetic Practices in the Conditions of Globalization 10See http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/marginal-utility/precarity-and-affective-resistance/
Yes, the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores ... If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Before looking to the media and aesthetics that break from the paradigm of globalization, I must first overview the trends across art and media aesthetics tied to the socio-economic conditions of globalization. I will touch upon a few themes in media and aesthetic practices within these conditions: to the proliferation of ‘memorial’ culture, nostalgia, hauntings, and the rise of the notion of a neo-romantic ‘nowhere’ in the post-millennial decade. In discussing the effects that are raised amid these themes, I will categorize the discussion by their type of social symptom: the rise of ‘memory’ and nostalgia in coincidence with the effect of homelessness and dispossession, the rise of hauntings as concurrent with the effect of a neurosis, and the rise of a neo-romanticism as the creation of an aesthetic ‘nowhere.’ My aim in this section will be to describe a series of aesthetic logics and their effects that can be combined into a trajectory of thought, through a series of small additions or turns of phrase. For example, my aim is to outline media practices that have gone from a growing ‘memorial culture’ and ‘nostalgic’ aesthetic, to one that becomes an aesthetic that is a ‘haunting,’ and then, how an aesthetic that relates to a ‘haunting’ may henceforth be turned into a ‘neo-romantic’ affinity for death. This trajectory is not meant to say that each type of aesthetic practice necessarily leads to the next, but rather to point out how with a certain turn of hand, one can indeed lead to the next. After discussing an overview of these and their effects, I will then articulate the arch that they ultimately evoke altogether as an aesthetic regime situated in an expanding globalization. Lastly, I will conclude this section with a discussion on the opportunity for new critical assessments of contemporary aesthetic trends, and how I will move forward with a critical assessment by looking through the paradigm of
globalization at the city of Detroit – the collapsing, not expanding, side of globalization.11 11 While speaking on examples from the literature, I will add additional notes to include similar examples that also connect to Detroit, in order to connect the examples that appear in the literature as also exemplary in the city of Detroit.
2.1 Retro-mania: Amnesia, Homelessness, and Dispossession
In his work on contemporary urban palimpsests, Andreas Huyssen charts the discourse around memory and historical consciousness from the turn of postmodern criticism to media practices today. He calls this a turn towards ‘present pasts,’ or a switch from modernism’s focus on the future, ‘present-futures,’ to the postmodern focus on revisionist histories and cultural memory in general, an effort to make visible or to surface various pasts in the present. In looking at ‘present pasts,’ Huyssen places recent discourse and media practices together as part of an ever-growing ‘memory culture’ that has abounded with globalization and globalized media culture. He enunciates this shift as crossing the line between ‘the end of history’ – or the end of the grand meta-narrative of history as Jean-François Lyotard named – to the proliferation of histories, the increase in cultural memory discourses, nostalgic media, and media culture of “self-musealization.” In looking to this array of cultural memory practices, Huyssen highlights an underlying paradox, stating that although there are ever-more present histories and growing memory cultures, the structures of our public media makes it clear that our “culture today … [is] somehow in the grips of fear, even a terror, of forgetting” (Huyssen, 28).12 On the one
hand, there has been the politically fruitful side of such, where cultural debates have raised “fundamental questions about human rights violations, justice, and collective responsibility,” such as discourse that deals with traumatic memory and “recovered memory” – the national memories related to genocide, slavery, and abuse (25). However, to look at these along with globalization, Huyssen points out, means to look at how these cultural memories are also now “shot through with the effects of global media”(27). Because of the widespread border-crossing abilities of global media, Huyssen thus questions whether or not “contemporary memory cultures in general can be read as reaction formations to economic globalization”(27). In other words, the rise of memory cultures and discourse may simply be the defense mechanism against the potential loss of 12 A 2013 exhibit at Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art, titled ‘The Past Is Present,’ commissioned fifteen artists to paint murals that portray Detroit’s history, as “responses to enormous losses in
population,” thus also is an example of a memorial culture in the grips of fear of forgetting.
site-specific memory due to globalized media and economies. Herein lies the paradox of contemporary memory culture: as the expansion of borders causes the proliferation of “memory-media” due to the fear of forgetting, the proliferation of more memory-media simultaneously threatens the ability of any memory to take hold, to actually become history or cultural memory.
Such a threat to cultural memory and history seems therefore tied to the fact that a global media culture not only disconnects from the local events which tie history to both time and place, but that the quantity of media set free across global mass media channels has no place to solidify. Huyssen makes an important distinction in the paradox in his example of trauma, that ‘the fear of forgetting articulates itself paradigmatically around issues of the Holocaust in Europe and the United States or of the desaparecidos in Latin America. Both, of course, share the absence of a proper burial site so key to the
nurturing of human memory”(28, my italics). Thus, we are reminded that it is not only globalization that escalates memory practices, but also that the fear of forgetting has historically been linked to the condition of not having a proper burial site. Therefore, the growth of memory practices and memory-media is clearly linked to an issue of a type of space: the proliferation, or ‘obsession,’ occurs when memories have no specific place to be grounded and remembered. Although not politically or socially equivalent, we may say that such an unrest may occur either when memories have no actual physical burial site, or from the multi-directional border wanderings of cultural media through
globalization. In the latter case, cultural memories have no place to live nor a place to be grounded. History has been made to wander listlessly, lacking both a home and a proper resting site.
The proliferation of memory-culture and its paradox can also be traced in the aesthetics of retro and nostalgic media and art practices. Since the turn of the postmodern era, an increasingly inflected “retro-media” is evermore apparent. In the early 1990s, Frederick Jameson claimed that ‘retro-media,’ or nostalgic media, produces a distance from lived history, inducing what he calls an ‘historical amnesia.’ According to Jameson, art and media aesthetics began to recycle in the postmodern era, merely producing a looping ‘pastiche’ of old styles. Jameson explains that pastiche is the “the imitation of
dead styles,” that it is “like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language”(16-17). Unlike parody however, which provides social critique, pastiche “is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction” (16). Jameson claims the reason for this feature of postmodern aesthetics is the result of “the advanced capitalist countries today [which] are now a field of stylistic and discursive heterogeneity without a norm,” and that it is due to “the absence of any great collective project” (16). In providing an example of postmodern pastiche, Jameson sketches the trend of ‘nostalgia films,’ citing George Lucas’ film
American Graffiti (1973) as its inauguration. In this film, Lucas attempts to recreate a lost
and ‘innocent’ small-town lifestyle of the Eisenhower era through pop music, classic cars, teenage relationships, quaint diners, and the aura of a ‘pax Americana.’ While historical films have long been present in the realm of film, American Graffiti is not based on historical figures or events, but is instead a series of fictional vignettes that attempt to evoke the feeling of a bygone era of small-town America through its aesthetics – a series of evocatively nostalgic snapshots.
Lucas’s film – along with a list of other examples across film, literature, and art – is a marker, Jameson argues, that there is an “incompatibility of a postmodernist
‘nostalgia’ art language with genuine historicity”(20). Instead of to history, pastiche points to “a crisis in historicity,” in which history is merely a series of recycled glossy images (21). The result is “the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future – has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a
multitudinous photographic simulacrum” (17). Such an effect rings of the critique in the opening of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which “the spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving” (Debord, 1). Therefore, with pastiche as an ‘imitation of dead styles’ amputated from lived history, Jameson also describes an historical crisis similar to the conclusion drawn above from Huyssen’s description – that history has been made into a homeless, zombie-like
wanderer through aesthetics just as with globalization policies. We can say thus say that media aesthetics that are raised from the dead without a connection to history or sans a
collective project, can be described as media aesthetics forced to be undead. Like the effects of globalization and expanded borders, the recycling of historical aesthetic styles, without a connection to the history of a time and actual place, are historical aesthetics that lack a home and an appropriate site of rest.
A decade after Jameson’s work on pastiche, Huyssen notes that the recycling of nostalgic media aesthetics have not ceased but continue to expand. Huyssen gives the example of media deemed “original re-makes,” such as the Aerobleu product line that “cleverly organized around a fictional Paris jazz club that never existed, but where all the greats of the bebop age are said to have performed”(31). The pastiche of retro aesthetics that Jameson spoke of is here not only marked by the re-surfacing of historical styles, the resurfacing of the bebop music style, but goes further by replacing the historical city of bebop. 13 In this way, the pastiche of nostalgic media, which Jameson said lacked any
embedded social critique or history in its looping of surfaces, now is further removed from an embedded historical place. Such can be seen by the removal of bebop from its origins and placing it in a historically imaginative, or fictional, Paris club. The reference to bebop jazz here is convenient, as it was the musical style invented in Harlem in the 1940s – Ralph Ellison’s Harlem era. The nostalgic versions of bebop in an imaginary Paris club thus pushes Jameson’s observation into a more extreme territory – the Harlem experience is no longer connected to the bebop music style when set in Paris, whose original artists strove to create a music that was not danceable, but demanded listening.14
Such a demand was connected to the critique of the social conditions of Harlem – to comment on the historical experience of living in ‘nowhere-ness’ – and is therefore an essential aspect of both its aesthetics and its socio-political history. 15
Re-making bebop against a false historical city backdrop thus not only fully severs it from history, but also severs it from its core political demands. The
13 In his article, Huyssen explains that the Aerobleu company produced a line of products around the idea of bebop jazz in a Paris café, and that in addition to CDs, also produced nostalgic memorabilia and ‘diaries’ of the great bebop musicians in a Parisian setting. It is therefore not merely the resurfacing of bebop music, but its reappearance with a fictional urban narrative that severs it bluntly from its origins.
14 Lott, Eric. Double V, Double-Time: Bebop's Politics of Style. Callaloo , No. 36 (Summer, 1988), pp. 597-605
15 A similar example can be seen with ‘Northern Soul’ music and its recent revival in DJ culture. Although originally stemming from independent record labels as alternative to the Motown label in Detroit in the 1960s, such as the label Ric Tic, it has now been associated with the ‘revival’ of British mod culture, including a graphic logo that depicts a white fist in a black glove.
contemporary trend of historical ‘re-making’ relates again to the problem connected to the effects of globalization – it is another case in which cultural memory becomes homeless and raised from the dead without a place to remain connected to its history. However, in this more contemporary version of nostalgic media, the aesthetic practice removes history through a deliberate act of dispossession. Arjun Appadurai speaks of ‘imagined nostalgia’ in his book Modernity at Large, giving examples such as the Filipine affinity and re-making of American pop music. With this practice, he puts forth that the Filipinos thus “look back to a world they never lost”(Appadurai, 30). The Aerobleu bebop music product line, on the other hand, is not a case of a local culture mixing their own culture with the imported media of another culture. The Aerobleu products were not the creation of the French, but were created by an American music company, the Verve Group. In this way, the music is forced away from its own historical setting in order to become a new commodity. With the Aerobleu line, there is a
purposeful creation of a false history in order to create a new commodity, and as such, the
aesthetics of this kind not only lack embedded social history, are not merely disconnected from their origins because of having been globally circulated, but have been purposely dispossessed at the outset. Ultimately, whether through aesthetic practices or economic ones, the crisis of contemporary history may be viewed as this: history is homeless and wandering, but has now also been purposely dispossessed, both physically and politically, by socio-economic and aesthetic practices.
2.2 The Haunted: Lamentation and Neurosis
A homeless memory and an unburied history invoke the notion of a wandering soul, a specter. Similar to Huyssen’s notion of ‘present pasts,’ another contemporary discourse related to the notion of the past in the present is the recent discourse on ‘hauntology,’ originally stemming from the essay by Jacques Derrida, ‘The Spectre of Marx.’ In the post-millennial decade, hauntology discourse on aesthetics and
contemporary conditions have moved focus away from pastiche and nostalgia as aesthetic tropes that invoke historical amnesia to the notion of the return of a past that haunts the
present. Although Derrida’s original essay was written in the early 1990’s in response to the discourse surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall and Eastern communism,
specifically in response to Francis Fukuyama’s argument that liberal democracy had triumphed and indicated the ‘end of history,’ Derrida’s term also resurfaced in the mid-2000s in critical discourse and as an aesthetic trend.
While Derrida’s text has many layers that have contributed to an array of critical debates across disciplines, I will make two distinctions in its trajectory. On the one hand, there has been the ‘spectral turn’ in discourse tied to the ontology of the specter. The notion of the ghost is the metaphor in Derrida’s deconstructive logic, which “challenges teleological thinking,” as the specter is an ‘out-of-time’ figure (Peeren, 14). The ghost-figure has a paradoxical visibility, “the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and blood” (14). As such, the notion of the ghost offers a way of thinking an ontology of the interstitial slot, of being both present and absent. While the figure of the specter gives a metaphor for thinking a way out of ‘the end of history’ (or a way around the end of Marxism) by remaining both present and absent, the appearance of a ghost and a
haunting are not necessarily the same thing. It is this second part, ‘the haunting’ that I
will focus on primarily in terms of memory and media aesthetics of recent years.
In 2006 on his k-punk blog, Mark Fisher called hauntology “the closest thing we have to a movement, a Zeitgeist” for the post-millennial era. Fisher’s statement, however, does not focus on the ontological status of the ghost as much as on the aesthetic trends of the last decade as marked by the ethos of being haunted. While a specter may haunt us, a haunting does not necessarily require such a figure. We may also be haunted by
memories, by guilt, by our losses, irrational phobias, former diseases, by what was stolen from us, or by our failures, to name a few. Such a notion can be seen throughout
Derrida’s work also, poignantly in his frequent quoting of Hamlet – ‘the time is out-of-joint.’ The specter of Hamlet’s father does not simply appear, but appears emphatically because he was thwarted. In other words, while ghosts or traces may occur for many reasons, we are haunted specifically by something when a thwarting, a failure, a betrayal, or a dispossession, has occurred – whether it be by others or by our own hand. Of course, Derrida’s hauntology also implies that ‘to be’ is ‘to be haunted.’ 16 Thus, the
16 As is often stated, ‘hauntology’ and ‘ontology’ in French are nearly the same and are a play on each other, as Colin Davis points out, “Hauntology supplants its near-homonym ontology, replacing the priority
hauntological trend of recent years is tied to this notion: we have been thwarted; we have been dispossessed. While Derrida’s original text said as much in relation to Marxism – that Marxism will haunt the newly rising capitalist global economy – aesthetic trends deemed the ‘hauntological’ focus not on the appearance of Marxism’s ghosts, but the hauntings of our dispossessions.
Thus the surging wave of retro-media of recent years analyzed by Jameson and Huyssen, has been revisited in another way. Looking at Fisher’s k-punk blog, the effects and invocations of retro-media have shifted from that of pastiche and amnesia, to that of lamentation. As Fisher describes of the hauntological aesthetic of contemporary music, there is a “peculiar aching quality of these songs that are melancholy even at their most ostensibly joyful, forever condemned to stand in for states that they can evoke but never instantiate. Not a past that belongs to an actual time of history, but a fantasmatic past, a Time that can only ever be retrospectively – retrospectrally – posited.”17 One of the main
ideas that hauntology centers around is the lamenting return to the ‘lost future’ contained in the past, or to reflect back on a time when ‘the future’ was still seemingly possible. Thus, here is where there is a turn of hand from nostalgia to hauntology. Whereas nostalgic films such as American Graffiti return to evoke a ‘lost innocence’ as the pleasant aura of a bygone era, the hauntological aesthetic returns to evoke the ache of a ‘lost future.’ Unlike nostalgia, which merely brings forth the styles of the past in the surface imagery, the hauntological laments not what is contained in the image of the past, but the past’s failure to produce the promise of progress. The present is in the past in the hauntological, like Huyssen’s description of retro-media, but in a different way as it adds a layer of expressive lamentation and skepticism.
As Adam Harper discusses of hauntological art, there are always two layers – one that is lo-fi (or that signifies the past) coupled with a layer that is newer or ‘high-fi’ (or that signifies the present). Some themes we therefore see repeated are: the failure of technologies of the past, where imperfect capture is highlighted as a failure of modernity, such as Luc Tuyman’s paintings of unfortunate camera flashes that mask important features; the practice of sampling older media such as old recordings of educational programming mixed together with new songs; and the theme of mixing childhood dreams of being and presence with the figure of the ghost” (Davis, 373).
(past hope) with adult nightmares (current reality). For example, as Harper points out, a good intersection of all of the above qualities is apparent in the music of the band Boards of Canada in their album Music Has the Right to Children18. Their songs often sample audio from educational television programming, such as the children’s show Sesame
Street, and mixes it with contemporary techno sounds of synth-electronica. In doing so,
the sampled layer from Sesame Street is deconstructed and lamented as “a faded
modernism arising from mid-twentieth-century television.”19 What makes hauntological
art different than merely nostalgic aesthetics is that “while the first layer might express hope and confidence, the hauntological layer contradicts and undoes this by expressing a satirical doubt and disillusionment … It’s the key role played by this hauntological layer that distinguishes hauntological art from art that’s simply retro.”20 Thus, the hauntology
aesthetic involves seeing a failure of the past, or a criticism of the failures of modernity.
Figure 1-2. Luc Tuyman, Passenger (2001) and album cover for Boards of Canada (1999)
18 Both Mark Fisher and Adam Harper speak about the Ghost Box music label, the label for bands such as Boards of Canada, as central to hauntological aesthetics in music of the current era. Another similar music label is Ghostly International from Detroit, which formed prior to the Ghost Box label and also has an imprint label called ‘Spectral Sound.’ Ghost Box and Ghostly International bands share similar aesthetic styles, and even often tour together in concert. http://ghostly.com/about
19 http://rougesfoam.blogspot.nl/2009/10/hauntology-past-inside-present.html 20 Ibid.
While nostalgic aesthetic loops in Jameson’s terms led to amnesia, I posit, with hauntology there is a not a forgetting, but instead a neurosis. Although it adds a layer of critique to its invocation of retro-media, hauntology’s constant revisiting of failures seems nevertheless to also create a loop. This time however, instead of pastiche, it is a looping neurosis of lamentations, a rumination on failures. Rumination, by definition, is to “go over in the mind repeatedly” or “to bring up and chew again what has already been chewed and swallowed.”21 Therefore with the hauntological, once again we are in a loop
of the ‘failure of the new,’ but this time with the addition of being caught in a loop of the failure of the past. While there is indeed a fruitful opportunity to create a breakthrough with rumination22, in order to move beyond the failure of the new, the rumination on
what exactly has failed is an important question, one to which I shall return in the next chapter. While potentially fruitful, the ghosts of the past that are made to wander with globalization and retro-pastiche now haunt us in the hauntological, but are never ultimately buried. In hauntological aesthetics, they therefore nonetheless continue to loop, to be homeless and dispossessed.
2.3 Neo-Romantic and Nowhere
Lastly, similar to hauntology, another discourse of the post millennial decade that has sought to describe aesthetic trends and the ethos of the contemporary moment is that of the ‘metamodern’, outlined in 2011 by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. In tracking media aesthetics and discourse of the past decade, Vermeulen and van den Akker put forth that critics agree that “the postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over” (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 1). What it is that has instead
emerged, however, is still under contestation. Thus, in surveying a broad range of recent media and aesthetic discourse and trends, Vermeulen and van den Akker put forth the descriptive term of the ‘metamodern.’ Similar to hauntology, which bridges between the past and present with a deconstructive critique, they claim that the metamodern ethos and 21 Definition of rumination in Merriam Webster dictionary:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ruminate
22Gilles Deleuze in an interview said “I would like to do philosophy in the manner of cows. Rumination …
There is an author who was able to ruminate, and he was a great among greats, this is Nietzsche.” http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/deleuze/article.php3?id_article=124
aesthetic exhibit a negotiation between two states, between “the permanent and the temporary” but also adds the turn of phrase “and the re-appropriation of culture through nature” (8). Similar to hauntological aesthetics, the metamodern bridges two states, however, it is not only past and present, but also the many states or multiplicities of postmodernity. As with hauntology, there is also a layering of a childlike dream mixed with an adult reality, in that it is inspired by a “modern naiveté´ yet informed by postmodern skepticism” (5). While hauntological aesthetics linger on a rumination of failures of the past, the meta-modern, however, seems instead to accept and even lionize them.
In looking at a broad range of works, across painting, film, photography, and architecture, Vermeulen and van den Akker thus name the metamodern aesthetic as one that exhibits a ‘neo-romanticism.’ One of their examples is the photography of Gregory Crewdson, who is famous for his cinematic photographs of “the melancholy beauty of the economically depressed ghost towns where industry has fled.” 23 While the
hauntological approach is to lament the failures of modern industry, or to look at the ghost town as a failure, the metamodern places an added emphasis on ‘the beauty’ of economic depression, seemingly to celebrate the failures.24 Such can be seen in one of the
authors’ surveys describing a metamodern romantic sensibility across film, painting, and other artworks:
One can see [the romantic sensibility] in the plethora of works of artists anew attempting to come to terms with their unconsciousness (think, for example, of Ragnar Kjartansson’s at once grotesque and heartfelt attempts to (re)create both his ‘‘erotic fantasies of death, longing and eternity’’ and the Weltschmerz stemming from his failure to do so entirely, or of Selja Kameric’s attempts to retrieve an irrevocably irretrievable past, or of Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Wes Anderson’s attempts to rekindle the naivety and
innocence of their childhood). What these strategies and styles have in common with one another is their use of tropes of mysticism, estrangement, and
23 Description of Gregory Crewdson photography from Variety, October 2012: http://variety.com/2012/film/reviews/gregory-crewdson-brief-encounters-1117948658/
24 Related to the idea of the celebration of failure and romantic views of economic depression is the contemporary trend of ruin photography, known as ‘ruin porn’ – something that Detroit is famous for, and which will be further analyzed in the next chapter.
alienation to signify potential alternatives; and their conscious decision to attempt, in spite of those alternatives’, untenableness. (9)
Vermeulen and van den Akker describe the acceptance of, or the choice for, an ‘untenableness’ across these works as the neo-romantic, or a move towards a sort of romanticized defeat – where the acknowledgement of being stuck is either met with “erotic fantasies of death,” the use of ‘alienation,’ and the preference for impossibility over other alternatives. For example, similar to the fictionalizing of Harlem’s
background, Wes Anderson’s recent film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), goes further in its fictionalizing. Whereas the Aerobleu product line surfaced the actual music of bebop, yet changed its historical backdrop with a false setting, Wes Anderson nearly surfaces a European history, but instead fictionalizes all aspects it in order to create a more innocent version of history. As the film is described as taking place “between the wars” – an allusion to World War I and World War II – it is nonetheless set in the fictional European country of ‘Zubrowska.’ In addition to a fictional European country and historical time, as the film does not touch upon the actual world wars (and gives different dates than the historical period), the film also introduces a fictional version of the Nazi regime. Replacing the swastika with a zigzag, the film shows the fictional regime occupy and take over the pastel pink hotel Zubrowska, leaving out any reference to a history of genocide. Thus, in this version of European history, a rekindling of naivety and innocence is possible, albeit at the expense, or dispossession of actual history.
In outlining the logic of metamodern aesthetics, Vermeulen and van den Akker name the logic of these works as employing an ‘atopic metaxis.’ Similar to the status of
the specter that Derrida and hauntology discourse puts forth of being ‘out of time,’ the
authors describe the term ‘metaxis’ as a state of “being simultaneously here, there, and
nowhere” (12). Stemming from metaxy, used by Plato to describe the condition of
‘in-betweeness’ as one of the characteristics of humanity – metaxis refers to a human experience situated between ‘the human and the divine,’ a romantic imaginary place for the human condition (Whelan, np). The term ‘atopic,’ is what is newly added to the concept, which they describe in terms of its ‘literal meaning’ as “a place (topos) that is no (a) place” (Vermeulen and van den Akker, 12). Thus, atopic metaxis as an aesthetic logic describes a practice that fractures time – by invoking a time ‘out-of-joint’– and also
a way to dispossess historical place by creating a ‘no-place’ or a nowhere. By invoking ‘atopos,’ a place that is “impossibly, at once a place and not a place, a territory without boundaries, a position without parameters” (12), the aesthetic of metamodernism “displaces the parameters of the present … and it displaces the boundaries of our place with those of a surreal place that is placeless” (12, my italics). Therefore, the
metamodern aesthetic not only alludes to, but creates a time and place that is no place – a
purposeful creation of ‘being in nowhere.’ As French anthropologist Marc Augé asserts,
“we live in a culture that puts emphasis on . . . non-defined places, places where people pass through instead of which they dwell” (Verhoeff, 32, my italics). As our cities are increasingly inflected with non-places with the rise of globalization, our media and art culture turns to put emphasis on aesthetic practices that also create places and non-times. Art and media aesthetic logics thus now contribute to the imaginary of the contemporary non-place with non-time, a history of an invented non-specific time and place.
Figure 3. Still from Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Thinking back once again on Ralph Ellison’s description of 1940s Harlem in the
introduction, where “one ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto
maze” (Ellison, 5) and where the existence in Harlem “explains the nature of a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the
marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence” (3) – we might then say that Ellison’s Harlem is no longer a description of the historical
experience of African Americans in 1940s New York, but is now also an apt description of the effects created by both globalization and contemporary creative practices of the metamodern world. Are the metamodern aesthetics, the hauntological, or the retro-media remakes, then, the jazz of the hour? Although they are diverse practices and offer
different aesthetic gradations, nonetheless, it seems difficult to name any of them as such. While bebop jazz worked against the sickness of the structure of the social order and pushed for a new politics of listening by introducing a new aesthetic in music, the
cultural and aesthetic logics described thus far have instead either worked alongside, or have been trapped, inside the social order of globalization.
As Andreas Huyssen points out, with the advent of globalization there comes “a slow but palpable transformation of temporality in our lives, centrally brought on by the complex intersections of technological change, mass media, and new patterns of
consumption, work, and global mobility” (Huyssen, 31). Without contesting the logic of globalization, or breaking out from the globalization patterns, the aesthetics of the current era operate along with it. While the social conditions are at times shown as nostalgic impressions, at times as lamented failures, and at times amplified as romantic, the problem of ‘being stuck’ or ‘the failure of the new’ to re-orient towards the future nonetheless continuously arises. While nostalgic media merely recycles old styles thus not creating anything new, retro-remakes fictionalize historical backgrounds, creating not a new aesthetic, but a dispossession, or a removal. And although the hauntological seems promising for interjecting social critique, as it offers a place to reflect, there is
nevertheless a liminality for an aesthetic practice to maneuver a sleight turn of hand, from presenting a ‘ghost’ as a place to reflect upon failures critically, to becoming a ‘beautiful ghost’ viewed as romantic and magical, thus changing the effort of critique to an
creating an imaginary time in a fictional nowhere. In this way, history is not in a crisis – it is dispossessed and replaced. Such is what I call the aesthetics of dispossession.
2.4.1 Defining Developmental Tendencies
Although the contemporary version may be different, the idea of the separation of art and media from historicity is not new. Walter Benjamin of course put forth this idea in his essay on art and technical reproducibility, claiming a rift in history simply as the result of reproduction. For Benjamin, replication automatically severed history from artworks, where “in even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique
existence – and nothing else – that bears the mark to the history which the work has been subject” (Benjamin, 103). It is not the hierarchal status of the replication that I draw a parallel to, but rather the effect that replication produces – the removal of historical place. My interest in Benjamin here is also in his method of charting the possible political practices of art after the advent of a new historical condition. That a copy immediately removed the ‘one thing’ that connects an artwork to history, or its ‘place,’ and that the technology presented an immediate mode of production for the ease in such a rift, pointed to a condition through which to analyze the ways that aesthetic practices may change. Thus, for Benjamin, technology presented a new condition of historical-rifting in more extreme ways than ever before, and henceforth new possibilities in the practices of art. The analysis of the mode of production (reproducibility) lead to the opportunity for “the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (102). As he states in his introduction, when changes in the conditions of production manifest “in all areas of culture,” there is then a “call for theses defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production” and that “theses defin[e] the developmental tendencies of art” which “can therefore contribute to the political struggle” (101). I therefore likewise traced the developmental tendencies in art amid globalization to chart some of the ways in which historicity is treated – as a method to henceforth articulate the possible demands for the politics of contemporary art when now turning to look at the conditions of the other side of globalization, to collapse, in the city of Detroit.
In Benjamin’s last paragraph of his essay, he ultimately states the two trajectories of art practices in the age of reproducibility, that is, that humankind’s “self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism
replies by politicizing art” (122). Looking at the trajectory or development of the
aesthetics outlined above, from nostalgia to retro re-makes that dispossess history, from hauntological sampling to metamodern acceptance of being out of time and in nowhere, we might now state what is not fully stated in the criticism that looks at each separately. With all metamodern as the final or most current point – we may say, as Benjamin does, that contemporary aesthetics have achieved pleasure from annihilation – the method of
aestheticizing dispossession of history, and the removal of the city. If we use Benjamin’s
view on this trajectory as a whole, yes, here is once again a method of gaining enjoyment from our own annihilation – the annihilation of lived historicity. In doing so, the line of thought in this trajectory thus achieves the removal of history, replacing it with a danceable pleasure. While postmodernity allowed for the multiplicity of histories, the dreamy ‘dance floors’ and surreal ‘out-of-time’ nowheres of contemporary art and media logics, as epitomized in the metamodern, only lead to a timeless, placeless world. A perpetual timelessness stitched together with perpetual placelessness is the removal of lived human space, and thus also the city, from historicity.25 In this way, the
developmental arch of aesthetics in the conditions of globalization ultimately annihilates the history of lived spaces, the city, as an aesthetic achievement. In tracing all of these
aesthetic practices, there thus appears once again a moment in which humankind has achieved the method of turning annihilation and dispossession into an aesthetic pleasure. I will now thus turn in the next chapter to further explore this notion – the aesthetic pleasure of annihilation – and analysis of it through the media and art practices surrounding the city of Detroit: Ruin Porn.
25 The removal of time and place of lived space need not only apply to the city – it may apply to any place at all where human affairs take place. However, for the purposes of this thesis I am focusing on the nuanced interpretation of this notion as it applies to the city.
3. Not Now, Not Here: The Ruins of Detroit
There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
In tracing the aesthetic practices of globalization as a trajectory that build upon each other, thus far I have looked at the manner in which aesthetics reflect and expand along with the conditions of neo-liberal expansion, border-crossing, and the dispossession of time and place brought along with the conditions of globalization. Such is what I ultimately tied to an aesthetics of dispossession. I henceforth now turn to look at the trajectory of these aesthetics in tandem with the conditions of a limit point – economic
collapse. In doing so, my aim is to help define the developmental tendencies of contemporary art and move towards the articulation of the possible political breaks. I therefore will look at contemporary aesthetics applied to the post-Fordist ‘ghetto’ of America: Detroit. Firstly, I must introduce the historical narrative of progress – the (broken) promises of modernity – as tied itself to the history of Detroit. Then, I will speak on the contemporary practice of ruin photography, also known as ‘ruin porn,’ as an aestheticizing of dispossession, offering further critique on such. In doing so, my aim is to further solidify the argument that contemporary aesthetic logics operate with the tendency towards annihilation and dispossession of history as an aesthetic pleasure – the ‘pornography’ of ruin.26
3.1 Detroit: Telos and Detroit History
Before turning to an analysis of media and art practices that center on Detroit, I must sketch its historical background and how Detroit poses a relevant place for analysis. Across the discourse of critical and cultural studies, modernity’s version of a ‘teleology of progress’ is often under contestation. Although much of postmodern critique – such as postcolonial and subaltern studies – have worked to break Western paradigms of
teleogical thinking, a persistent narrative of progress exists in mainstream political-economics. For example, when describing the rise of urban poverty in ‘third’ world areas, normative descriptions of progress name such poverty, or slums, as a result of a step towards progress, in that “neoliberalism structured the market such that previously subsistence agricultural land became privatized and dominated by a few large farm producers. Looking for employment after declining rural prospects, the masses made up of peasants and landless tenants moved to the cities”(Almeida, np). In this way, the teleology of progress names the city a replacement of the farm and narrates urban poverty as merely a ‘growing pain’ in the process of development. In this narrative of teleological progress, the Western world, or the global North is considered the ‘developed world,’ 26 The comparison alone of the terms ‘pleasure through annihilation’ to the label ‘ruin porn’ is aptly already the same notion. Indeed, they are nearly synonymous phrases.
while the ‘third world’ – mainly former colonies and the rest of the global south, is considered ‘in development,’ or moving towards a better economic life. The city of Detroit – the poorest urban population of America – however, offers an uncomfortable break for the teleology of Western ‘development,’ and is therefore fruitful to interject into the narrative.
3.1.2 A Brief History of Detroit
At the turn of the 20th century, Detroit was the heart of modernization and the
industrialization of America. As the birthplace of Ford, the assembly line, and the automobile, the ‘Motor City’ changed American life and industry forever. American historian Thomas J. Sugrue writes, “no technology has had a greater impact on American everyday life than the automobile. Where we live, how we work, how we travel, what our landscape looks like, our environment have all been profoundly shaped by the car” and moreover that “no place better demonstrates the social, economic, geographic, and political changes wrought by the automobile industry than Detroit, the Motor
City”(Sugrue, np). Fordism, however, did not only change the future of America, but became the symbol of a global future: Detroit was the future of modern progress. As Franco Berardi writes, “On February 20, 1909 Filippo Tommaso published the Futurist Manifesto, the same year that Henry Ford launched the first assembly line in his
automobile factory in Detroit …The assembly line is the technological system that best defines the age of industrial massification. Thanks to it … the mobilization of social energies was submitted to the goal of the acceleration of labor’s productivity” (Berardi, 21). Fordism was the global model for the progress of modernity and industrialization, the promise of modernity lamented in hauntological aesthetics discussed earlier, and Detroit was its birthplace and center.
After the proliferation of the assembly line, “[over] the course of the twentieth century, the Motor City had become the Motor Metropolis, going from twenty square miles to several thousand square miles.”27 The auto-plants grew, the city expanded with 27 Thomas Sugrue, University of Michigan,
poured-concrete streets and highways, and the population surged with employed workers. Detroit became the fourth largest and one of the richest cities in America by the 1950’s.28
More people owned homes in Detroit than any other American city, across all racial and ethnic demographics. However, as the auto-industry followed the trend of
decentralization of industrial manufacturing, it brought with it the next leg of the city’s history: the decline of the inner-city. The “neighborhoods hardest hit – most emptied out – were the city's oldest” and “those neighborhoods that abutted now closed-down
factories,” subsequently “lost half their population after 1960. Large parts of Detroit's east side … saw massive depopulation and abandonment.”29 What therefore remained in
the heart of Detroit was not only a steady pattern of economic decline and job loss, but
also the populations who were not able to leave – the poor and the African Americans
who were discriminated against under the Jim Crow laws of segregation. As de-centralization began in the 1960’s, causing many to move to the suburbs in order to follow employment, the laws of segregation were still intact. In this way, racial
discrimination combined with the process of decentralizing industrialization, led to the creation of a quarantined city, and a primarily African American population thusly severed from the mainstream economy.30
Despite the obvious racial discrimination legacy in Detroit, however, to view Detroit’s racial history as a special case of American racism would be false. As Kali Gross writes, Detroit was considered one of the most ‘progressive’ black cities, where African Americans were paid more than the national average, a large black ‘bourgeois’ class emerged, and, where “black autoworkers and labor unionists made themselves a force to be reckoned with—and not only with respect to labor organizing but also in regards to pressing issues such as police brutality” (Gross, 524). Nonetheless, the members of the population who did not have the right to leave initially were the African Americans. Thus what does make Detroit a special case, is that African Americans were the ‘hardest hit’ of de-industrialization. The “black liberal politicians inherited a city that fast became isolated and economically eviscerated” (524, my italics). As “financial
28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid.
