• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

The Dissertation Committee for Anthony Joseph Fassi III Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Manufacturing Ruin Committee: Jeffrey L. Meikle, Supervisor Elizabeth Engelhardt Mark C. Smith Steven Hoelscher Martin Kevorkian Manufacturing Ruin by Anthony Joseph Fassi III, A. B.; M. A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May 2013 Manufacturing Ruin Anthony Joseph Fassi III, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2013 Supervisor: Jeffrey L. Meikle “Manufacturing Ruin” argues that the most important moments in the history of the concept and consciousness of “American ruin” accompany volatile episodes of progress and decline in American manufacturing. This dissertation attends to the construction of “American ruin” in response to the rise of manufacturing in the early to mid-nineteenth century and the decline of industrial capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Americans have manufactured picturesque ruins and spectacular episodes of ruination both to conceal and reveal and to “contain” and “harness” destructive forces inherent to capitalism. In some cases, ruins have been represented in ways that conceal processes of ruination inherent to their own destruction. In other instances, episodes of destruction demonstrate that in attending to particular processes of ruination, Americans have intentionally ignored others. iii Table of Contents LIST OF FIGURES .............................................................................................................. V INTRODUCTION: RUINS AND RUINATION .......................................................................... 1 CHAPTER ONE: THE HEAD AND HEART OF AMERICAN RUIN ......................................... 15 Domesticating the Picturesque .................................................................................. 27 James Fenimore Cooper’s “Nice Machine” .............................................................. 47 CHAPTER TWO: CORPOREAL RUINATION AND EXPLOSIVE GROWTH ............................. 56 Gunpowder And Steam ............................................................................................. 62 Lavoisier’s Apprentice .............................................................................................. 74 Gunpowder Pastoral .................................................................................................. 83 Sophie’s Quiet Pastoral ............................................................................................. 94 Civil War Images and Nineteenth-Century Ruin .................................................... 112 CHAPTER THREE: URBAN EXPLORATION ..................................................................... 122 A Brief History of Urban Exploring ....................................................................... 125 The Urban-Explorer Text ........................................................................................ 137 Infiltrating Historic Preservation ............................................................................ 154 CHAPTER FOUR: RUINING DETROIT ............................................................................. 166 Detroit’s Decline in History and Myth ................................................................... 171 Demolishing Detroit ................................................................................................ 185 Ruin Porn: Manufacturing Utopia .......................................................................... 194 Recovering Ruin ..................................................................................................... 201 CONCLUSION: “PROMISCUOUSLY MINGLED” ............................................................... 206 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................ 210 iv List of Figures Figure 1.1: Frontispiece to The Home Book of the Picturesque (1852). 34 Figure 2.1: Sophie du Pont, “Mill and Ruins” (1828). 98 Figure 2.2: The Shenandoah Pulp Factory at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. 99 Figure 2.3: Alexander Gardner. “Antietam, Maryland. Bodies of dead, Louisiana Regiment” (1862). 113 Figure 2.4: “Charleston, South Carolina Ruins” (1865). 114 Figure 2.5: “Richmond, Virginia. Ruins of Gallego Mills,” (1865). 115 Figure 2.6: George Barnard “Ruins of North Eastern Railroad Depot” (1865). 120 Figure 3.1: Michael Cook, “Tailrace.” 148 Figure 3.2: Jean Baptiste Viot Repairing the Pantheon’s Wagner Clock. 156 Figure 4.1: “A World of Wares and Services behind Walls of Giant Department Store.” 185 Figure 4.2: The former site of J. L. Hudson’s Department Store in downtown Detroit. 187 v Introduction: Ruins and Ruination In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin famously described his vision of the angel of history: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events” – history, a sequence, a progression – “he sees one single catastrophe” – modern capitalism as a cycle of devastation – “which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel of history “would like to make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise [. .] The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”1 For Benjamin, a twentieth-century flâneur who sifted through the refuse of Paris’s ruined nineteenth-century Arcades, fragments and ruins bore traces of a utopian truth. The ruin exposed, if only momentarily, the reality of constant ruination. In 1931 the architect Le Corbusier celebrated America’s factories as the “magnificent first fruits of the new age.”2 The emblematic form of Le Corbusier’s “new architecture” and of American industrial modernism found its apotheosis in Detroit’s monumental factories. Once the source of a streamlined storm called progress, Detroit has since become a landscape filled with ruins. Yet, a linear narrative of history still dominates the historical memory of the once great city. Decline, it turns out, is every bit as illusory as progress and no less spectacular. 1 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 227. 2 Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1986), 31. 1 Only in the first decade of the twenty-first century did Detroit emerge as the epicenter of a popular and scholarly discourse regarding what has become known as the modern ruin. A crisis in the sub-prime lending market and the subsequent collapse of the United States housing market are among the events that led to the global financial crisis of 2008. The “Great Recession,” an American economic downturn eclipsed only by the Great Depression, precipitated an explosion of interest in modern ruins scattered across the transatlantic West. In 2011, British human geographer Tim Edensor went so far as to compare the twenty-first century “turn to ruins” to the “craze for romantic ruins in the Victorian era.”3 Modern ruins, for instance, have engaged academics working in a wide variety of disciplines.4 The already robust corpus of scholarship dedicated to modern ruins has also invigorated the historical study of ruin and ruination, of which this dissertation is an example.5 As Benjamin’s “angel of history” reminds us, the word “ruin” operates as both a noun and a verb. “Ruin” describes an object like Detroit’s Packard Automobile Plant, 3 Tim Edensor, “Comments to G. Gordillo: Ships stranded in the forest,” Current Anthropology, 52:2, (2011), 162. 4 The modern ruin has attracted the sustained interest of cultural geographers, archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, literary scholars, urban studies scholars, and historians. Notable work on the subject includes Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics, Materiality (London: Berg, 2005); Shannon Lee Dawdy, “Clockpunk Anthropology and the Ruins of Modernity,” 2010; Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination,” 2008.); Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal, “Time to Destroy: An Archaeology of Supermodernity,” Current Anthropology 49.2 (2008), 247-279; and Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, eds., Ruins of Modernity (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). Also, the newly formed Journal of Contemporary Archeology promises to be “the first, dedicated, international, peer-reviewed journal to explore archaeology’s specific contribution to understanding the present and recent past.” Publication will commence in May 2014. See https://www.equinoxpub.com/journals/index.php/JCA.). 5 The most relevant histories include two recently published studies of American ruin. See Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012) and Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 2 abandoned in 1956, as well as a process of ruination, which might be as “fast” as the explosion of a steamboat or as “slow” as the centuries-long erosion of antiquities. In this study, I attend to both ruins and processes of ruination in discussing key moments in the concept and consciousness of “American ruin.” The title of this dissertation, “Manufacturing Ruins,” announces

Load more

  232

Copy Link