the ruins as a metaphor of modernity

THE RUINS AS A METAPHOR OF MODERNITYThe Aesthetics of Ruins by Robert GinsbergReview by: Leonidas DonskisSoundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 89, No. 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2006), pp. 431-439Published by: Penn State University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41179205 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 10:18

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Soundings:An Interdisciplinary Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.53 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 10:18:45 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=psup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/41179205?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


THE RUINS AS A METAPHOR OF MODERNITY

Leónidas Donskis

Robert Ginsberg The Aesthetics of Ruins.

Amsterdam/New York, NY: Rodopi, 2004.

Jt was deeply appropriate for me to review Robert Ginsberg's The Aesthetics of Ruins in Visby, a spectacular medieval town on

Gotland Island, Sweden, famous for its beauty and almost intact ruins.1 Here, the ruins appear as open-ended forms, pregnant with the past and capable of inspiring the future. They offer the possibility for an imagined dialogue with a distant historical epoch. These ruins give concrete shape to mental life, to a Gástles- leben as Georg Simmel and Thomas Mann would have it. As what André Malraux designated a museum of the imagination, they provide a discursive map of our existence in the realm of modern history and culture. It is a good place to celebrate Robert Gins- berg's Book, The Aesthetics of Ruins. So be it.

Ginsberg's book invites many considerations. It certainly looks like a major project of his life - elegantly written, closely argued, richly documented, impressively illustrated, and exceed- ingly readable. At the same time, the book is distinguished by its clarity, boldness, decisiveness, and also by its extraordinary sense of form and style. Beautifully produced, big (538 pages), and illustrated with the author's own photographs, the book will both attract and provoke its readers. Several reading strategies could be suggested for this volume. Among other things, it is a travel

Leónidas Donskis is a Political Science Professor at Vytautas Magnus Uni- versity, Lithuania.

Soundings 89.3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006). ISSN 0038-1861.



432 SOUNDINGS Leónidas Donskis

account, a philosophical essay, and also a set of reflections upon the modern condition. Its territory is immense.

It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to call this Ginsberg's mag- num opus, since it far exceeds the conventional wisdom of standard academic monographs. Ginsberg's idiom is immensely rich. It embraces a variety of literary genres and forms of academic writing, including lucid and precise theoretical formulations, poems, elegant essays, and travel accounts. The bold and beautiful prose of The Aesthetics of Ruins reshapes itself in each chapter of the book: It starts as a travelogue and then turns into a philosophical essay, only to shift suddenly into a sketch or a joke, and then reassert itself as a refined interpretation of a work of art. Ginsberg creates something like a carnival of literary and academic genres. He sets in motion the kind of picturesque carnival of language that Mikhail Bakhtin describes. In doing so, Gins- berg overtly challenges the dull, bloodless, and jargon-ridden language that is the standard idiom in most books of philosophy.

In celebrating this confluence of literary forms, the author is a legitimate heir to Sir Thomas More, Desiderius Erasmus of Rot- terdam, and François Rabelais. The scholarship of More, Eras- mus, and Rabelais would have been unthinkable without that same confluence of languages that is an inescapable part of Gins- berg's dash and style. Just as Bakhtin's theory of the novel owes its insights to the analysis of Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel, so Ginsberg's work owes much to More's Utopia, Erasmus's Enco- mium Moriae {Praise of Folly), and to the whole linguistic and poetic universe of Renaissance scholars. Appropriately, this very modern work builds upon the ruins, as it were, of these early modern texts.

In his philosophical diatribes, parodies, letters, and comedies, More found himself enchanted with Lucian, exactly like his best friend Erasmus with whom he translated Lucian into Latin in Paris. And like Ginsberg and More we find it impossible to draw a sharp dividing line between philosophy and literature when we analyzes the relationship between Niccolo Machiavelli's Prince and his play Mandragola, for instance, or between his Discourses on Livy and his other comedies. Here, the Christian Machiavelli is being astonishingly Roman and pagan, both in content and form. How could we ever put aside Gargantua and Pantagruel when talking about More's Utopia, if we know that Pantagruel' s



The Ruins as a Metaphor of Modernity 433

mother, according to Rabelais, was the descendant of the Prince family in Amaurote, the capital of Utopia?

Ginsberg's style and idiom are also reminiscent of the history that Giambattista Vico narrates as an alternative to Cartesian philosophy. Also like Vico, Ginsberg attempts a grand reconciliation of all aspects of language, all faculties of the soul - scholarly and poetic, epical and lyrical, personal and communal, traditional and modern. Like Vico, Ginsberg achieves a happy union of con- cept and metaphor, analysis and story-telling, fairy-tale and dis- course. He unites anecdote and the grand narrative, the petit histoire and the grand recit. Not surprisingly, Ginsberg's metier is the imagination, rather than reason. In this he is an heir to Vico too. In its evocation of the past, the book comes to explore the edge of the modern and to reveal the horizon of the postmodern. Like ruins themselves, deliberately unfinished works of art have their own metaphysics and aesthetics, and so does an unfinished and open-ended thought. Robert Ginsberg creates a new kind of scholarship: reflective, ironic, critical, atten- tive to the details of human existence, and, most importantly, perfectly aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the human world.

In Ginsberg's work, ruins appear as a powerful expression and a most telling metaphor of the modern historical, cultural, and moral imaginations. They are a source of inspiration, inseparable from the philosophy of history and the comparative study of civilizations. Suffice it to mention two English historians who described what appeared to them as the ruins of Classical Antiquity - Edward Gibbon and Arnold J. Toynbee. The ruins of Capitol in Rome inspired Gibbon to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The ruins of the Parthenon temple on the Acropolis in Athens, the world's greatest example of Doric architecture, urged Toynbee to start working on his monumental and volumi- nous work, A Study of History.

Of course, the ruins of Rome inspired as well the imagination of the great sculptors and architects of the Renaissance, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Michelangelo. Or recall Hubert Robert, a French Rococo Era landscape painter sometimes called "Robert des Ruines" because of his many romantic representations of Roman ruins set in idealized surroundings. His vision of the peaceful and serene coexistence of Roman ruins and vegeta-




tion - a synthesis of culture and natural life - came to define Roman aesthetic ideal.

Yet Ginsberg goes beyond this survey of the classical and romantic views of ruins. His landmark study provides an interpre- tive framework for a modern aesthetics of ruins. By no means, he argues, are ruins a symbol of destruction. For him, ruins signify the triumph of life over death. He invites us to consider chamber music nights and operatic performances set in the ruins, or a beautiful flower blooming in the ruins of the Dachau concentration camp. The latter example is extracted from one of his photographs, "Ash Box, Concentration Camp, Dachau, Germany, 1985" (423). This is just one of many beautiful photographic plates. What comes to my mind in seeing their powerful expression of Ginsberg's optimism is Dylan Thomas's poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." Recalling Theodor Adorno's crucial question of how is it possible to write poetry after Au- schwitz, we could refer to Ginsberg and suggest, along with him, that the flower blooms in Dachau regardless of our ruined lives, anguish, and traumatic experiences. In pictures as well as print, the book argues that life prevails over death. Creative vitality never fails in the face of brutality and destruction. Why not celebrate life and why not write poetry then?

In the open-ended existence of ruins, the past graciously ex- tends an invitation to the present and the future urging us to imagine peace between nature and culture. Ginsberg makes it clear that the ruins could be regarded as a universal idiom of human existence. Philosophy, literature, fine arts, nature, TV, cinema are all related to ruins. Not a single aspect of human existence escapes the ruins. Of course, life can be reduced to ruins, yet life is also made up of ruins, of excerpts, quotes, fragments of knowledge, and the like. We incorporate ruins in life itself, and this creates the ambivalence we feel when we contemplate what Zygmunt Bauman calls "life in ruins."

According to Ginsberg, our language itself rests on the ruins of other languages, either modern or ancient ones. The latter are dead since nobody uses them to communicate anymore. The En- glish language, for instance, rests on the ruins of Latin and Greek. Half of its modern vocabulary came from French, and the rest from Germanic influences. English is the embodiment of the existence and creative vitality set on the ruins. So, too, I add, is




my native Lithuanian, one of the most archaic languages in Indo- European family. It should have been buried long ago, yet it is still alive and well today. It is the language that survived within the ruins of Sanskrit and Latin.

Ginsberg understands ruins as a symbol of the very foundations of our fragmented existence. As such, they are the heart of modernity: the disconnected fragments of life, society, existential experience, philosophy, literature, cinematography, TV, high- brow and popular cultures, Kitsch and melodrama. He quotes Pe- ter A. Redpath's claim that we stand on the ruins of the great philosophical systems and on the rubble of grand historical nar- ratives. Yet, our fragmentary writing has its unquestionable charms. At this point, Jean Baudrillard sounds quite in tune with Ginsberg. As Baudrillard suggests in the motto of his book, Frag- ments: Cool Memories III, 1990-1995:

Fragmentary writing is, ultimately, democratic writing. Each fragment enjoys an equal distinction. Even the most banal finds its exceptional reader. Each, in turn, has its hour of glory. Of course, each fragment could become a book. But the point is that it will not do so, for the ellipse is superior to the straight line . . .

Similarly, our body and its mortality can be described as our ruins. Death defines our finite world. The infinity of the finite, the end of the beginning, Death comes to define our place in the universe, history, and society. As Ginsberg graciously consoles us,

Death is essential to our definition as mortals. Without Death, we would not be living creatures. That is the inescapable truth, and the truth will kill us. Every birth certificate is completed by a death certificate. No mater how dedicated to life, we have been cast in the die of mortality. While God remains dead silent, Death an- swers. (405)

Having described Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece, The Seventh Seal, (which was shot among the ruins where I write this review) , Ginsberg cites Edgar Allan Poe and then the old Capulet from William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet He quotes them on love and death only to come to the following conclusion:

We, the living, bear Death within. The skeleton, our most intimate ruin, is the backbone of our living flesh. We incorporate, incar- nate, encase it. We are skeletons fleshed and ambulatory for the moment. The skull, Death in a nutshell, "that ruined palace of the mind". . . when placed upon the desk or in the hermit's cave, was the simplest grave reminder. Memento mori, morbid moment: you




too are a skull that gazes upon a skull. One day, your skull may be gazed at by another. No bones about it. (408)

As becomes obvious here, ruins convey a powerful moral mes- sage - think, for instance, of the vanitatum vanitas still life paintings in Flanders and in the Netherlands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries where a skull beside food, a glass of wine, and flowers remind humans of their temporality and mortality. Reproaching humanity for their vanity and wickedness, the paint- ers of the Golden Age of Dutch art acted as secular preachers and social critics. The skull - the most powerful reminder of the ruins of the human body - allowed them to criticize such human weaknesses as the inclination to luxury and self-deception. Much the same applies to the memento morì paintings where the flower, the sand-clock, and the skull are the most telling details of human fragility.

Human civilizations, like human bodies, also rest on the ruins of the past. Of the ruins of civilizations, ruins on a grander scale, Ginsberg writes:

Thus, we are Roman and Greek ruins, just as Rome is thought to have taken up the ruin that was Greece. The Renaissance, in turn, thought itself to have rediscovered antiquity's ruins and sought to bring them forth with new life. We have lost that burst of energy and treasuring of the past. We have lost faith in reason and the advance of civilization. In the popular view, past civilizations are dead. But we are rapidly becoming the past. (355)

Not all representations of the past function as ruins, however. If authentic ruins remind of death, the artificial reconstructions of the past found in theme parks seem to suppress any awareness of mortality. Ginsberg addresses this attempt to fabricate history and to forge historical memory. He sees it as a sort of self-indul- gent fantasy. This modern folly, which might be termed the Dis- neyland syndrome, usually goes hand in hand with distaste for the ruins. Ginsberg assesses it in the following remarks on the old Capitol at Williamsburg, Virginia, United States:

Williamsburg plays a persuasive role in American taste. It is first in the lineage of Disneyland and Disney World, Fantasy Island, theme parks, and Hollywood Studio tours. Williamsburg puts the question of taste this way to America: What good is a ruin, when we can rebuild it with ingenuity, accuracy, safety, and convenience? . . . The restoration, in this view, is more authentic than the ruin, because it is the intact whole put back in working order. In the ruin, we have lost the original. In the restoration, we have lost the ruin,




but, supposedly, we do have the original. Williamsburg gives us the tasteful fantasy, not the reality, of the Colonial. Many original intact buildings form part of the fantasy, though we do not notice which ones they are. . . . Williamsburg is a time machine that allows us to indulge in an American specialty, the world of fantasy that we can enter, accompanied by our accustomed conveniences. To dine by candlelight in one of the inns and stay over night in a four-poster bed is a treat. Williamsburg is a history park that offers a good show to the whole family .... The Disney creations go one step further. They do not need the foundations of an original structure or the historical site. Everything can be recreated afresh in a single location, providing all possible amenities for visitors. Everything runs smoothly. Nothing is broken. No ruins, unless they are fabricated synthetically to add authenticity to the scenery. (189-190)

Having quoted Ginsberg on this disturbing tendency of modern consciousness, I hasten to add, though, that I doubt that such things occur only in the United States. Baudrillard points out that a spectacle like Disneyland functions as a simulacrum precisely because it creates an illusion that its artifice is unique. According to Baudrillard, by making a show of its pure and dimensionless simulations, it disguises the artifice of the sur- rounding society; it hides the fact that America herself - America as a whole - is a huge Disneyland. Therefore, Disney- land is a metaphor, a device, and a symptom of artificiality which conceals the disturbing fact that our so-called authentic reality has become nothing but a colossal fraud. This is to say that when- ever we invoke History with a capital 'H,' we do so in order to decorate our mundane reality and its fragments with the para- phernalia of a distant epoch. This fraudulent past merely conceals the fact that history is dead and buried beneath its glowing facades.

We have also seen enough of this modern folly in Europe. At this point, it is quite sufficient to mention my native Lithuania. Lithuanian authorities have recently decided to immortalize themselves by building from scratch the Grand Ducal Palace next to the historic building of the Arch-Cathedral of Vilnius, thus fabricating history and placing the real historical monument in jeopardy. Although historians argued that it would have been much more reasonable to leave the ruins, further exploring and protecting them by conservation, theirs was a voice in the void.




In his recent publications and interviews, Umberto Eco has warned Europe about this obsessive need to fabricate history by forging supposedly historical images and producing shining artificial objects, instead of preserving the authenticity of ruins and reflecting on what has been marked by history. The unpleasant truth is that the untouched, authentic ruins are not as profitable as the forgeries or small replicas of Disneyland. How can we make our petty secular pilgrimage to the holy places of tourist bliss and organized consumption without being able to consume History itself safely and comfortably?

The commercially organized and reworked history, the indus- try of the past, is a parallel reality which has little, if anything at all, to do with the silent being of ruins whose authenticity calls for an open-ended dialogue with modernity. Ginsberg catches the essence of the interplay of the infinity of the forms manifest in the ruins and of the openness of a modern life in the following passage:

The great cities of Jerusalem, Rome, Istanbul, Paris, and London are constantly struggling to live with their heritage, to sus- tain a modern life freed from the restraints of their past, yet to keep alive whatever in that past is worth saving. These cities are paradoxes. They cannot be fully modern; they refuse to remain antiquarian. They must creatively encounter the ruin of themselves.

Many ways of living with the ruin are possible. We may leave it alone to follow its life, while we pursue ours. We may carefully preserve the ruin, treat it as a public monument, and endow it with symbolic significance. We may also build on the ruin, build with the ruin, or rebuild the ruin. The ingenuities of architecture . . . are many-storied. (187-189)

Robert Ginsberg's book allows us to see ruins as the ever-last- ing possibility of the transformation of reality, as a discovery of the past that promises to enrich the future. Most importantly, in his work, ruins become a perspicuous metaphor for modernity with its predicaments, tensions, and uncertainties. While we attempt to overcome these uncertainties by searching for solid foundations for our lives and historical identities, we, at the same time, passionately cling to the fragments of today. Ginsberg's book reminds us of this paradox of modernity better than anything else.




NOTES

1. On December 9, 1995, Visby was included in the UNESCO list of those historic towns that must preserve their unique heritage for the generations to come and for the future. I have reviewed Ginsberg's book here acting as a Fellow at the Baltic Center for Writers and Translators in Visby.

Ingmar Bergman, whose masterpiece, the classic film Det sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957), Robert Ginsberg aptly describes in his analysis of the ruins and of representations of Death, lives on the remote and austere island called Faro, Gotland. More than that, he was shooting some of his masterpieces there, since Faro is famous for the shining on the surface of the Baltic Sea and also for its huge cliffs on the seashore.



the ruins as a metaphor of modernity

Documents