In the ruins, ‘master narratives of history as progress decompose into the tense confabulations of a continuously remembered past that hits the present like a nervous shock’ […]. The past is where things fell apart, because they are transient. The ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin, they are the debris of unprecedented material destruction […] ‘the “trash” of history’ […]. Forgetting this carnage [would be to support] the myth of […] progress […]. But the ruins remember the processes of ‘repetition, novelty, and death’ […]. For ‘the crumbling of the monuments that were built to signify the immortality of civilization becomes proof, rather, of its transiency’ […], revealing the fragility of the social order. […]. Hauntings rupture linear temporality, inconveniently bring forth energies, which have supposedly been extinguished and forgotten. […]
Ruins have long symbolised the fear that civilizations eventually crumble, that empires ultimately fall. The topology of industrial ruination engenders a ‘post-industrial nostalgia’ scarred by [millennarian] fears of apocalypse and the terror of a new medievalism. The morbid apparition of a return to chaos is also a vestigial memory of the horrors of an unimaginable past, a macabre visitation, which flits through the myth of progress, the previously triumphant factory system, and a degenerating imperial power.
The spectre of disintegration rears up in the representations of a geography of ruination, which circulate through popular culture […]. Ruins are […] populated by Dr. Wh*s, replicants, robocops, outlaws, cyber-punks […], a spectral cast who combine atavistic elements […], both dystopic and utopian future capabilities. As less regulated spaces, the ruins offer a home for the urban uncanny. Romantic conventions of what rural tumbledowns, classic ruins or old castles typically invoke a Gothic picturesque which marks the cycle of birth and rebirth, and is interwoven with intimations of a morbid desire for the mystery of death […]. Likewise, in industrial ruins, the Gothic intrudes, mingling the living (plants, fungi, birds) and all that points to death. […] ‘[A] […] preocuppation with boundaries and their collapse’ […] conjuring up a landscape of moral, spiritual and bodily decay, within which ‘boundaries between the “normal” and the pathologized “other” collapse’ […]. Likewise, ghosts defy binary oppositions such as ‘presence and absence, body and spirit, past and present, life and death’ […]. And like the Gothic, ghosts bring ‘into shadow that which had been brightly lit, and brings into light that which had been repressed’ […].
Industrial architecture articulates the necessity of ordering, of scheduling and disciplining. Ghostly traces of the banal workings of order line the walls and floors of ruined factories: the spatially organized hierarchy embodied in the foreman’s hut, the office suites, the instructions to workers, clocking on apparatus.
But the process of decay mocks the previous compulsion for order.
In industrial ruins, a radical re-ordering, or dis-ordering, carries on, now immune to the imperatives of production and progress, to the will of managers and time-keepers. […]
Cities [and places, generally] seem to becoming increasingly regulated. In the transformation towards a service economy during the 1980s, Thatcher’s broom swept away many of the remnants of 19th century British industry. Old industrial sites were turned into shopping centres, retails parks and leisure sites. […] There is then, in the drive to market places, to create new post-industrial images and identities, an aesthetic imperative to smooth over the cracks […], and to fix the past, so that it does not intrude into an imagined linear future. Yet the process is not seamless. In less wealthy urban areas, old industrial buildings linger and decay. […] Fenced off and policed, feared as dangerous locations […], they become a familiar locus horribilus. In cahoots with architects, heritage workers and marketeers, they suggest that the past is a distant, romantic echo that resounds faintly in museums […]. Yet the ruins shout back at the refurbished urban text. Populated by ghosts, they haunt the city, for the unofficial past cannot be exorcised […].
Ruins are sites where we can construct alternative stories to decentre commodified, official and sociological descriptions, and conjure up spooky allegories that keep the past opened […]. Counter-memories can be articulated in ruins, narratives that talk back to the smoothing over of difference. Away from the commercial and bureaucratic spaces of the city, ghosts proliferate where order diminishes. Ruins are spaces where the unseen and forgotten lurk, but they are especially important, because as Avery Gordon says, it is ‘essential to see the things and the people who are primarily unseen and banished to the periphery of our social graciousness.’
Text by: Tim Edensor. “Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality.” Space and Culture. January 2002.
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