2022-02-13
One of the byproducts of my hobby of wandering around mountainous rural villages are encounters with abandoned buildings. Tunnels, houses, bridges, whatever it is I like to observe the way the moss or vines wrap around the structures and ponder on what makes these things evoke this unexplainable feeling of…dread? Perhaps it primordially reveals itself in an Heideggerian sense, when the house strips itself of its instrumentality and exposes its underlying skeleton, the crumbling cement, the wooden foundations, the roof tiles peeling away to show its internal organs. The building is one giant hammer that reveals itself as unready-to-hand.
First urban exploration is approached by observing the forms and matter; where is the entrance, how is the soundness of the structure, what kind of damages did it get afflicted with, and what are the hazards for me to navigate through the space. After these initial precautions then comes the question of what the building is, what kind of objects are in the house, who lived here, when was the building made, how did it degrade leading up to the present, etc. But as Heidegger suggests, there’s obviously more than just “abandoned buildings cool”, because the thing in themselves doesn’t have meaning, the primary concern is the context of the building in relation to the world and myself, by revealing it as present-at-hand. By understanding how we perceive these buildings, we also unveil ourselves and our assumptions about our lifeworld.
Urban exploration differs from going to the museum in a few ways because for one the ontic has already been solved by archeologists and historians, hence the connection not being primordial but rather derivative, but also being displayed in a glass case removed from its environmental context, the building’s lifeworld is lost, which I’m more interested in the environment itself rather than the things in it. Apart from the fact that ancient civilization feels too detached from current affairs, actively being situated into a space that retains (or at least shows remnants of it) its original atmosphere, and the connection to the lifeworld that I currently dwell in, is what makes it intimate.
History extends before and after our lives, but to really feel the historicity that the world existed far before one were born as societies die and reincarnate itself over and over is what makes abandoned buildings existential in relation to time. This disclosing of the nothingness is paradoxical in that on one hand, one feels historical dread; one’s actions have such minuscule importance relative to history, but there’s a comfort in realizing that the world is indifferent and as a result one’s actions do not matter, they are terrifyingly free.
「廃墟とは、人の手を離れ放置されてから、人工的な取り壊しや自然による崩壊に至るまでのほんの一瞬の存在である」
(廃墟の歩き方26)
Urban exploration is a low-form architectural archeology that document these rapidly degrading buildings before they disappear in an instant, which this feeling of temporary-ness latch into your own morality, reminding one of the intimacy of death.
“Gamblers’ ‘struggle’ for the certain and sure- or for the ‘certain rapid resolution of an uncertain outcome’, as Goffman put it- is compounded by the technology of machine gambling. As machine gamblers will continue to tell us in the next two chapters, what they seek is a zone of reliability, safety, and affective calm that removes them from the volatility they experience in their social, financial, and personal lives. Aspects of life central to contemporary capitalism and the service economy- repetitive exchange between individuals, money as the chief symbol or form of this exchange, and the market-based temporal framework within which it is conducted and by which its value measured- are suspended in machine gambling.”
(Addiction by Design, 262)
As anxiety grows amidst ecological disaster and post-bubble economic stagnation, the politically disillusioned youth grappling with the volatility of technological innovation and the responsibility of freedom comes along with it, comes a constant state of alienation from the world. The requirements for meeting the definition of what it means to be a competent human being is near impossible to achieve amidst unreasonable pressure on education, as I look at these indulgent bubble-era buildings rot away with its hopes and dreams of the gilded age. Parallel to the gambling machines (I don’t gamble, this is just an allegory), these buildings give me a sense of that certainty amidst such unpredictable times, that it is only destined for death.
Liminality
The definition; “a location which is a transition between two other locations, or states of being” fits Husserl’s concept that most unquestionably accept the lifeworld as natural attitudes, which seems increasingly technological, and it is when it drastically changes when we recognize that we mustn’t assume the environment must only be in a particular fashion. An empty school is liminal in that one only has the assumption that a school is a vibrant place with students shuffling around the hallways and classrooms, but once it is removed from its usual context, it feels uncanny, enough that you still feel the presence of the students as if the brain has such an ingrained idea of a school that it tries to fill in the gaps by manifesting ghosts. Expanding on the “transition between states of being”, although abandoned buildings deviate from the typical internet aesthetics of nostalgic vacant malls and schools, the phenomenology is similar in that the building that once manifested itself into existence as a means, loses its identity as there is no longer an ends and nobody is there to encounter it. Does the building then lose its context of existence, has it it been alienated from the world through enframing, fallen into a limbo realm? In a sense abandoned buildings feel like an “out of bounds” area not meant to be seen, both in terms of the lifeworld and legal boundaries. It unveils the comforting tight-knit dwelling of our world that we took for granted, and the immense nausea when we see the endless void that was hidden from the constraints of the level.
On aesthetics
The Rhine river as Heidegger explains, corrupts even the most pristine of nature as we can appreciate its unspoiled nature but it is still anthropomophic, it still caters to the tourism industry that is willing to exploit it. There’s something inauthentic about the overly-romanticized depiction of nature that sterilizes its true being as both beautiful and ruthlessly ugly, which I feel “wholesome” media tend to reduce the discussion of environmentalism as an aesthetic discussion of “pretty nature good” and “ugly city bad” without criticizing the broader flaws of our ontological attitudes, especially when we segregated ourselves from nature and develop our social skills with nature purely through such media. There needs to be maintained a certain distance to respect the autonomy of nature, otherwise excessive romanticization ultimately becomes domestication. Abandoned buildings represent the true resilience of nature, as ugly, efficient, and unembellished as the weeds are. The recognition of intrinsic value in existence is difficult to recognize amidst our capitalist paradigm that seeks to commodify everything, even time and being itself, and while there’s no fault in appreciating nature’s aesthetics, its value mustn’t be reduced by pretty-ness which is another form of anthropomorphic utility. But I digress, my honest feelings are that I want to understand the precarious nature of existence and my chronic homesickness, nature is simply an allegory for the predicament within modernity; it is obsolete just like the abandoned building.
The conflict of an apocalypse, as hyperbolic of a term that is to describe abandoned buildings, revolves around the event itself that led to the abandonment. It usually revolves around the former residents surviving, and crucially having some hope that they can somehow rebuild. The post-post-apocalypse, when the the agony is no longer there, or rather people cease to exist to feel such agony, flips itself into a stronger sense of peace never present before as the greenery takes over to makes a pretty landscape. But this desire to escape from the frustrating human condition should not be a fatalistic one, as some people have reacted to abandoned buildings as “nature reclaiming what is once theirs” or “humans are the real parasites” but the binary between humans and nature still exists, the same way technology and humans are seen are separate entities. It is irresponsible to think like some trad fascist that resorts to human sacrifice as a solution to environmentalism because it is always the powerless who never had the ability to challenge the status quo in the first place to be the victims first. I wish to not fetishize abandoned buildings, as much as I think that they are beautiful.
So crucially the conclusion to all this isn’t some reactionary agrarianism to be blinded by nostalgia in an attempt to revive the corpse somehow, because the point is to overcome history, not to revive it.
“We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which by itself time will bury to oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition. This is the reality in which we live. And this is why all efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.”
(Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism,1950)
The best we could do is hope that the building will act as fertilizer for something better to manifest, to have the imagination to think of a radically different future because as flawed as the city is, it’s dumb to think we need to “go back to nature” and sprawl back, undoing the work of urban density. Running away into the countryside isn’t going to free one from technology because technology isn’t a physical concept but a spiritual attitude, a lens in which we perceive the world that to us modern people see the world as standing reserve ready to be exploited which prevents any other possibility of revealing. As much as I don’t agree with techbro rhetoric, they are right in that technology is inevitable and the best we could do is be politically conscious, maintain balance and bully them on social media.
Anyways, abandoned buildings are cool. I’m probably not supposed to be here, but here it discloses reality like no other place.
