Recognizing Ruins: The Need for an Environmental Ruin Aesthetics in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This thesis identifies the need for an updated approach to ruin aesthetics that integrates recent work in environmental aesthetics alongside discourses about the changing meaning of “nature” in the Anthropocene epoch. By examining the eighteenth-century origins of nature aesthetics and its development into an aesthetics of the environment in the late twentieth century, I reveal how scholarly and popular modes of ruin representation and appreciation evolved in tandem with the aesthetic appreciation of the natural world. This inquiry shows how ruin appreciation ought to be reevaluated in light of contemporary perspectives in environmental aesthetics. As the Classical and Romantic ideals that dominate ruin appreciation reproduce untenable models of humanity’s relationship to nature, I argue that incorporating ruin aesthetics into environmental aesthetics will help widen the aesthetic considerations we view as relevant to the experience of ruins. In describing the prevalence of ruin imagery in contemporary culture, I also demonstrate the necessity of treating recently ruined sites as candidates for aesthetic appreciation. By acknowledging the experiencer’s continuity with ruins, rather than treating these sites as mere traces of ideal forms of the past or as only evoking Romantic images, we can affirm the ecological, social, and aesthetic forces made materially available by ruins of the not-so-distant past. These insights reinforce the importance of closely examining how the concept of the sublime functions in relation to ruins. Recently ruined sites such as deteriorating houses, derelict factories, and industrial wastelands often produce deeply negative responses as we confront what has become of the ruin—and what the ruin is becoming. I argue that, although traditional theories stress the role of negative emotion in the sublime, their emphasis on pleasure as the end of aesthetic experience presents aesthetic and ethical difficulties in the context of environmental degradation and ruination. Drawing on Carolyn Korsmeyer’s account of the sublime in ruin appreciation and Arnold Berleant’s concept of the “negative sublime”, I identify negative responses as being fundamental to contemporary ruin experience. I conclude by underscoring how cultivating greater sensitivity to the spaces we are immersed in ensures that these experiences are meaningful rather than trivial.