'Becoming-ruin': travelling towards an 'ethos of letting go' with the post-industrial ruin
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2016-03-11
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en
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This thesis examines the ontological and ethical value of the post-industrial ruin. By engaging with an object that is generally deemed useless, I analyse our normative processes of value creation in the city. Demonstrating the often overlooked value of the post-industrial ruin serves to tell an Other story about the spaces we inhabit and the things we appropriate. I start out by examining a concrete account of Dutch urban planning strategies: the ‘Oude Kaart van Nederland’ report on vacancy and redesignation of Dutch towns and cities. An analysis of this document shows that Dutch urban planning strategies aim to construct the city as a coherent and logical ‘Whole’: a transcendental system, in which all the parts seamlessly fit together, and which is presented as a complete and natural unity. The post-industrial ruin does not fit within this neatly woven urban fabric and threatens to expose its constructed nature. Therefore, vacancy is prevented at all costs. I aim to oppose the normative and transcendental urban planning strategies outlined in the ‘Oude Kaart’ report by arguing that the ruin holds important ontological and ethical values, exactly because it does not have a fixed form and function. Taking Deleuze and Guattari’s machine-ontology as a system that adequately describes the complex and relational nature of entities, I argue that the urban ruin can teach us an important lesson about the ontological structure of ourselves and (the entities in) our built environment, while the planned environment tries to conceal it. This thesis discusses the planned city as a space where processes of ‘becoming’ are structurally stifled and reduced to sameness. The urban ruin, to the contrary, is a space where processes of becoming are allowed to go off in multiple directions and explore their polyvocal and nomadic nature. As such, I discuss the modern, Western city centre as a fixed, transcendental, a-historical and a-social space of ‘being’ and the post-industrial ruin as a fluid, anti-transcendental, historical and relational space of ‘becoming’. Moving from an ontology of the ruin towards an ethics of the ruin, this thesis ends by exploring how an encounter with the material of the ruin might help us make the important shift of perspective from a transcendental, anthropocentric ethics of Reason to an anti-transcendental, non- anthropocentric ‘ethos of letting go’. With this shift of perspective, we can learn to positively expand our interactions with things and work towards an ethical and inclusive becoming of ourselves and the entities we are networked together with.
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Faculteit der Letteren