An upcoming event about Ruins of Modernity looks at the symptoms and effects ruination stands for especially in the dialectical process modernity is related to – as a steady shifting between mythology and self – destruction.
Included in the presentations and lectures is a new film in which Detroit again is the research object of a project to look at the city’s history and decay. |
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. (link)