Julia Hell is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Post-Fascist Fantasies: History, Psychoanalysis, and East German Literature, also published by Duke University Press.

Andreas Schönle is Professor of Russian Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Ruler in the Garden: Politics and Landscape Design in Imperial Russia and Authenticity and Fiction in the Russian Literary Journey, 1790–1840.

RUINS of MODERNITY

Duke University Press

Contents

Chapter One

Products of Modernity

At a time when the promises of the modern age lie shattered like so many ruins, when we speak with increasing frequency of the ruins of modernity, both literally and metaphorically, a key question arises for cultural historians: what has shaped our imaginary of ruins in the early twenty-first century? For example, do we think primarily of the bombed-out cities of the Second World War and of the decaying residues of the industrial age and its shrinking cities in Europe and the United States? Or does the contemporary love affair with ruins resemble the earlier fascination with the ruins of classical antiquity? Where do 9/11 and the bombing of Baghdad and Falluja figure in this discourse, if at all? And what is the relation of this imaginary of ruins to the obsessions with urban preservation, remakes, and retro fashion, all of which seem to express a fear or denial of the ruination by time? Clearly our imaginary of ruins can be read as a palimpsest of multiple historical events and representations, and the intense concern with ruins is part of the current privileging of memory and trauma both inside and outside the academy.

Given this overdetermination in the way we imagine and conceptualize ruins, I would like to ask whether there can be something like an authentic ruin of modernity. To look for an answer, I will go back to the earlier imaginary of ruins that developed in the eighteenth century's quarrel of the ancients and moderns, was carried forth in romanticism, and privileged in the nineteenth-century's celebratory and deeply ideological search for national origins, only to end up in the ruin tourism of our time. I intend this chronicle to sound like a narrative of ruinous decay, as a move from the authentic to the inauthentic. Key for my argument will be the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, which I see as one of the most radical articulations of the ruin question within modernity rather than after it.

My interest in coupling the abstract concept of authenticity with the concreteness of ruins and their imaginary is based on the idea that both the ruin itself and the notion of the authentic are central topoi of modernity rather than results of what Hobsbawm has called the age of extremes. Modernity as ruin was a central topos long before the twentieth century. What I call the authentic ruin is not to be understood as some ontological essence of ruins, but rather as a significant conceptual and architectural constellation that points to moments of decay, falling apart, or ruination as early as the beginnings of modernity in the eighteenth century. Just as the imaginary of ruins was created in early modernity rather than being modernity's end product, the notion of authenticity is a thoroughly historical concept produced by modernity itself rather than referring to an atemporal transcendent essence or to a premodern state of grace. Tied in literature and art to eighteenth-century notions of authorship, genius, orginality, selfhood, uniqueness, and subjectivity, the idea of authenticity became more desirable and intense the more it was threatened by alienation, inauthenticity, and reproducibility in the course of modernization. As a term in that broader semantic field, it had its heyday in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit and Adorno's claims for the authenticity of modernist art. Its popularity today can be found in retro authenticity, authentic remakes, and authenticity consulting, all phenomena which implicitly though unknowingly deny what they claim to be. At the same time, authenticity has fallen on hard times in intellectual discourse. From Adorno's denial of any authenticity to life in capitalist society to Derrida's critique of any essentialism, authenticity has been disparaged as ideology or metaphysics, tied to a jargon of Eigentlichkeit, pseudo-individualization, and delusions of self-presence.

Nevertheless, I am not ready to abandon the concept altogether, and I take comfort in the fact that even Adorno, one of the most radical critics of the post-1945 form of Eigentlichkeit, still spoke of the authenticity of modernist art as radical negation. His is a notion of the authentic aware of its own historicity. Similarly, I will locate the authentic ruin of modernity in the eighteenth century and suggest that this earlier imaginary of ruins haunts our discourse about the ruins of modernity. At the same time, I acknowledge that the twentieth century has produced a very different imaginary of ruins that has made the earlier authentic ruin obsolete. Even genuine or echt-as opposed to authentic-ruins have metamorphosed. The idea of decay, erosion, and a return to nature, so central to the eighteenth-century imaginary of ruins, is eliminated when Roman ruins are sanitized and used as mise-en-scne for open-air opera performances (the Baths of Caracalla in Rome); when ruins of medieval castles or dilapidated estates from later centuries are transformed into conference sites, hotels, or vacation rentals (Paradors in Spain and the Landmark Trust in the United Kingdom); when industrial ruins are made over into cultural centers; or when a museum like the Tate Modern installs itself in a former power plant on the south bank of the Thames. Authenticity itself seems to have become part of preservation and restoration.

Authentic ruins, at least as they existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seem to have no place in late capitalism's culture of commodity and memory. Commodities in general do not age well. They become obsolete and are thrown out or recycled. Buildings are torn down or restored. The chance for things to age and to become ruins has diminished, ironically in the same measure that the average age of the populace continues to rise. The ruin of the twenty-first century is either detritus or restored age. In the latter case, real age has been eliminated by a reverse face lifting, whereby the new is made to look old. Repro and retro fashions make it increasingly hard to recognize the genuinely old. Kluge once spoke tellingly of "the attack of the present on the rest of time."

If in the late twentieth century, as Lyotard has claimed, architecture and philosophy lie in ruins, leaving us only with the option of a "writing of the ruins" as a kind of micrology, then the question arises whether the tradition of modernist thought all the way into postmodernism is overshadowed by the catastrophic imagination and imaginary of ruins that has accompanied the trajectory of modernity since the eighteenth century. Architecture in a state of decay or destruction seems to be an indispensable topos for this tradition. Real ruins of different kinds function as screens on which modernity projects its asynchronous temporalities and its fear of and obsession with the passing of time. Benjamin says that allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things; this implies a production principle of modern art, literature, and architecture which is a priori directed toward the ruinous. For Adorno, in analogous fashion, the most authentic works of modernity are those which are objectively and formally determined by the ruinous state of the present. The architectural ruin seems to hover in the background of an aesthetic imagination that privileges fragment and allegory, collage and montage, freedom from ornament and reduction of the material. Perhaps this is the secret classicism of modernism which, however different from eighteenth-century classicism in its coding of temporality and space, is still predicated on an imaginary of ruins. Classicism in the eighteenth century defined itself through the ruins of antiquity, but aimed at a totality of style and symbolic representation rather than privileging montage, dispersion, and fragmentariness as modernism did. One doesn't have to be a metaphysician of history in order to see, from today's perspective, the field of classical modernism as an oscillating landscape of ruins left from a failed attempt to create an alternative kind of totality that in architecture was called International Style.

As a product of modernity rather than a phenomenon from a deep premodern past, authenticity is analogous to Benjamin's aura. Originality and uniqueness, which characterize the auratic work of art in Benjamin, were made into privileged categories in an earlier age that was already flooded by reproductions, translations and copies of all kinds. Analogously, the ideological value of authenticity rose in proportion to mass culture's inherent tendency toward reproduction and repetition. Even in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production, we can detect the attempt to return the semblance of authenticity and uniqueness to commodities by means of customization. Aura and authenticity are analogous to each other. Both have to be framed historically rather than ontologically. Modernist decisionism declared both of them dead and gone, but both have proved to be resistant to ideological critique. The desire for the auratic and the authentic always reflected the fear of inauthenticity, the lack of existential meaning, and the absence of individual originality. The more we have learned to understand all images, words, and sounds as always already mediated, the more it seems we desire the authentic and the immediate. A gap opens up between intellectual insight into the obsolescence of authenticity and the life world's desire for the authentic-cuisine, clothing, identity. This longing can be seen as a media culture's romantic longing for its other. Reality TV is its pathetic expression. As we know from the critique of the concept, the positing of stable origins and a historical telos are never far when the authenticity tune is being played. The same is true for the discourse of ruins, which has played such a central role in legitimizing the claims to power of modern nation-states.

Indeed, romantic ruins seem to guarantee origins. They promise authenticity, immediacy, and authority. However, there is a paradox. In the case of ruins, what is allegedly present and transparent whenever authenticity is claimed is present only as an absence. It is the imagined present of a past that can now be grasped only in its decay. Any ruin posits the problem of a double exposure to the past and the present. If the modern ruin is not exhausted by the semantics of pastness, its temporality, which points to past glory and greatness, is clearly different from the claims of plenitude and presentness invariably at stake in the discourse of authenticity. Yet authenticity claims are often contaminated by doubts which then have to be alleviated by further mythmaking. Thus some would claim that authentic authenticity was only possible in the past when the world was allegedly still bersichtlicher and not under the shadow of media representation and distortion. We know what kind of ideological phantasms such projections of authenticity have caused in the humanities and social sciences-from the authenticity of the archaic and primitive to the privileging of authentic community as opposed to the anomy and artificiality of modern societies. Especially in the post-Enlightenment discoveries of origins and national identities, the present of modernity appeared-more often than not-as a ruin of authenticity and a better and simpler past. Against this idea of a deep authenticity embodied in the ruins of a glorified past, I posit the idea of the authentic ruin as a product of modernity itself rather than as a royal road toward some uncontaminated origin.

Nostalgia is never very far when we talk about authenticity or romantic ruins. The political critique of ruin nostalgia simply as regression corresponds to the philosophical critique of authenticity as a phantasm grounding stable identities. But such a critique misses the fundamental ambiguity of the ruin and the authentic. However justified it may be to criticize the ideological instrumentalization of authenticity claims, it will not do to simply identify the desire for authenticity with nostalgia and dismiss it as a cultural disease, as Stewart argues in On Longing. Neither will it do to understand the modern imagination of ruins and its link with the sublime as expressing nothing but fantasies of power and domination, though that is the case for Speer's theory of ruin value. The dimension present in any imaginary of ruins but missed by such reductive critiques is the hardly nostalgic consciousness of the transitoriness of all greatness and power, the warning of imperial hubris, and the remembrance of nature in all culture.

At stake in the authentic ruin of modernity is not simply the genuineness or Echtheit of specific ruins, nor is it some superhistorical memento mori. Genuineness as naturalness in opposition to artificiality and the fake-a topos central to eighteenth-century aesthetics and middle-class culture-is an empirically verifiable criterion of the ruin, and the memento mori dimension is not limited to modernity. We can speak of the modern authenticity of ruins only if we look at the ruin aesthetically and politically as an architectonic cipher for the temporal and spatial doubts that modernity always harbored about itself. In the ruin, history appears spatialized, and built space temporalized. My thesis is that an imaginary of ruins is central for any theory of modernity that wants to be more than the triumphalism of progress and democratization, or the longing for past greatness. In contrast to the optimism of Enlightenment thought, the modern imaginary of ruins remains conscious of the dark side of modernity, what Diderot described as the inevitable "devastations of time" visible in ruins. It articulates the nightmare of the Enlightenment that all history might ultimately be overwhelmed by nature, a fear succinctly represented in Goya's famous etching El Sueo de la Razn Produce Monstruos.

Let me use Goya's etching to return to Piranesi, the master of the eighteenth-century ruin. The ambiguity of Goya's title is well known. "El sue? de la raz?" means both the dream and the sleep of reason, thus pointing to what came to be known as the dialectic of the Enlightenment. There is, however, a third reading of the title. Let us think of the figure in the etching-who is dreaming or sleeping at his table, upon which we see the instruments of writing-as the artist imagining the other of reason, imagining what will become the etching before us. Let us assume that Goya's figure is Piranesi at the very moment of dreaming the shape of ruins as they will come alive in his etchings. Putting the emphasis on sue? as fantasy and representation rather than simply sleep or utopian anticipation permits me to read Piranesi as the creator of an authentic imaginary of ruins that reveals something central about modernity and its representations.

Piranesi's etchings from the middle of the age of Enlightenment point toward a critical and alternative understanding of modernity that stands against the naive belief in progress and the moral improvement of mankind. Although Piranesi's nightmarish image world had a strong influence on romantic literature, nineteenth-century romantic images of ruins tended to domesticate and beautify ruins by making them picturesque. It is no coincidence that Piranesi's work has been rediscovered in the twentieth century, often in the context of reductively realistic claims that his Carceri anticipated the univers concentrationnaire of fascism or the Stalinist gulag. Another presentist reading is that these etchings articulate the existential exposure and cast-out state of the modern individual in the face of overwhelming systems. Such interpretations ignore the connection between Piranesi's fantasies of incarceration and the archival documentation of the architectural ruins of the Roman empire which constitutes the major part of his work.

Art historians tended to confirm such views to the extent that they read the Carceri as a bizarre creation of the artist as a young man, focusing on Piranesi's role in the eighteenth-century quarrel over whether the architecture of Athens or that of Rome should have pride of place. This question was surely central to Piranesi's archival work in and around Rome, but exclusive focus on this debate ignores the fact that reworkings of the Carceri spanned most of Piranesi's career. It also fails to stress the fact that later versions of the Carceri are visually very close to the etchings of Roman ruins.

(Continues...)

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