Past Conferences

University of Michigan, March 17-19, 2005

Conveners: Julia Hell, German, University of Michigan, and Andreas Schonle, Slavic, University of Michigan (currently at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary, University of London.)

Sponsors: The University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities, the Center for European Studies, the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, the Center of Russian and East European Studies, the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and other units.

9/11 represents a watershed in world history in more ways than are obvious. The destruction of an architectural and symbolic icon of modernity has brought to a catastrophic climax a debate about the ways in which modernity, broadly conceived, seems to have invented, framed, and even produced ruins. The question whether international terrorism is a side-product of modernity or a historical development responding to, but independent of, modernity echoes discussions around a possible elective affinity between ruins and modernity. Indeed, ruins began to be perceived and preserved as ruins only during the Renaissance, when the awareness of historical discontinuities, the demise of ancient civilizations, raised the status of traces from the past. These traces--architectural remnants that had long lost their functionality and meaning--could be invested with various attributes, historical, aesthetic, political and otherwise. A desire for preservation in the interest of historical continuity barely concealed political exploitations of ruins as signs of past greatness that could be reappropriated. The ruin is a ruin precisely because it has lost the presence of meaning, while retaining its suggestiveness. It bespeaks a loss of something, while denying complete irretrievability of the absent object. It evokes an ambivalent break from and nostalgia for the past. More pointedly, it signals the imminent breakdown of meaning, and therefore fosters dizzying compensatory discursive activity.

Theoreticians of various stripes have considered the peculiar status of ruins in modern culture. Georg Simmel thought that ruins embody the justice of destruction, the reintegration of human design into nature that counteracts human interventions and makes them right. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the process of ruination is an intrinsic component of the dialectic whereby modernity undermines itself and lapses into mythology and self-destruction. Walter Benjamin drew a parallel between the ruin in the realm of things and the allegory in the realm of thoughts, for both ruin and allegory speak of a disruption in the relationship between form and meaning, to the point that semiotics becomes a wasteland. Iurii Lotman has considered the ways in which ruins serve the project of cultural self-fashioning. Sigmund Freud framed the unconscious as a sort of ruin that needs to be excavated. W.G. Sebald referred to ruins as a trope of the trauma of modernity in several of his essays and fiction pieces. This rich body of approaches to ruins illustrates vividly the extent to which the ruin is predicated on a particular gaze cast upon it. The beholder is the one who defines the ruin, and the ruin could not exist without such creative appropriation. The ruin, in many ways, is a trope of reflexivity, the reflexivity of a culture that interrogates its own becoming. As a result, the ruin is often the playground of specular strategies that tell us more about the identity of the beholder than that of the ruin or its original environment. This conference, along with the events organized around it, will analyze the entanglement of political, philosophical, and aesthetic discourse that the ruin as a site or meta trope of modernity has generated. Poised at the symbolic end of the project of modernity, we will ponder the ways in which the ruin intersects with the two major axes of modernity: the divide between the east and the west, which has produced distinct variants of modernity, and the asymmetry between hegemonic and subaltern cultures, which continues to produce more ruins. Our work will be organized in a series of case studies grouped thematically and geographically. We are inviting major scholars from a variety of disciplines, including architectural design, architectural history, cinema, classics, cultural history, cultural studies, anthropology, history, literary criticism, and sociology, as well as artists. Our focus will be interdisciplinary in method and global in reach.

This project included programmatic development for a variety of audiences: a Rackham interdisciplinary graduate seminar in the fall of 2004; an exhibit of etchings by Piranesi, and subsequently, a show by Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov (major shows at MOMA and Tate gallery and in other venues) at the Institute  for the Humanities;  and a series of films screened in February and March 2005. A major international conference took place in March 2005, facilitating exchange between scholars across disciplinary and national boundaries, preceded by a one-day graduate workshop, in which students from the Rackham seminar presented their work. The documentary movie Detroit: Ruin of a City, by Michael Chanan and George Steinmetz, was unveiled during the conference.

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