Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Seeing the Future in the Present Past

Siobhan Lyons perceives the flow of history in terms of organic growth and decay.

“This is the lesson that history teaches: repetition.”
Gertrude Stein

Down the end of the street where I used to live in Melbourne there was an old house that became abandoned. For the longest time the house went through varying stages of decay, with boards put up over the windows, graffiti on the walls, and weeds obscuring the litter left behind by the teenagers who would frequently loiter inside the abandoned structure.

Our contemporary obsession with modern ruins, ambiguously dubbed ‘ruin porn’, has a tendency to trivialise the importance of such sites, which appear out of phase with our normal experience of the present. In her book Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten (2015), historian Kate Brown talks instead of ‘rustalgia’ (cf nostalgia).

…