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The sublime object of Detroit
Lucas Pohl
Department of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt, Germany
ABSTRACT
If there is one object that characterizes the rising interest of human
geographers to study the ruins of the recent past, it is the Michigan
Central Station in Detroit. While no city has more often been used as
ablueprintforcontemporaryurbandeclinethanDetroit,itsruined
train station has become the global symbol for ‘ruin porn’.Ruinpornis
often criticized for stimulating the viewer’simaginationinsteadof
taking into account what ‘really’goes on in the city. However, in this
article, I argue that ruin porn does not create a fantasy of ruination, but
on the contrary eliminates the space for fantasy. Drawing on psycho-
analytic theory, I explore how local ruin gazers turn Michigan Central
Station into what Jacques Lacan calls a ‘sublime object’,aremainderof
loss that triggers a strong nostalgia. Subsequently, I retrace how ruin
porn ‘desublimates’the ruin by exposing its ‘naked’materiality, and
how the first reopening of Michigan Central Station during its renova-
tion ‘resublimates’the object by projecting a comeback of Detroit onto
its dilapidated walls. In conclusion, I call for deeper consideration of the
intertwining between fantasy and materiality in geographic research
on urban decay.
Le sublime objet de Détroit
RÉSUMÉ
S’il existe un objet qui caractérise l’intérêt croissant de la
géographie humaine pour étudier les ruines du passé récent, c’est
bien la Michigan Central Station à Détroit. Alors qu’aucune ville n’a
été utilisée plus souvent que Détroit comme modèle du déclin
urbain contemporain, sa gare en ruine est devenue le symbole
global du « ruin porn ». Il est souvent reproché au ruin porn de
stimuler l’imagination du spectateur au lieu de prendre en compte
ce qui se passe « réellement » dans la ville. Cependant, dans cet
article, je soutiens que le ruin porn ne crée pas un fantasme de la
ruine, mais élimine au contraire l’espace du fantasme.
En m’appuyant sur la théorie psychanalytique, j’explore la façon
dont les observateurs des ruines locales transforment la Michigan
Central Station en ce que Jacques Lacan appelle un « objet sublime
», un reliquat de perte qui déclenche une vive nostalgie. Puis, je
retrace la façon dont le ruin porn « désublime » la ruine en exposant
sa matérialité « nue », et comment la première réouverture de la
Michigan Central Station pendant sa rénovation « re-sublime »
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 31 January 2019
Accepted 6 September 2019
KEYWORDS
Lacanian psychoanalysis;
Detroit; ruins; sublimation;
nostalgia; ruin porn
MOTS-CLEFS
psychanalyse lacanienne;
Détroit; ruines; sublimation;
nostalgie; ruin porn
PALABRAS CLAVE
psicoanálisis lacaniano;
Detroit; ruinas; sublimación;
nostalgia; ruin porn
CONTACT Lucas Pohl pohl@geo.uni-frankfurt.de Department of Human Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt
am Main, Theodor-W.-Adorno-Pl. 6, Frankfurt 60323, Germany
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY
2021, VOL. 22, NO. 8, 1063–1079
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1683760
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
l’objet en projetant un come-back de Détroit sur ses murs délabrés.
En conclusion, j’invite à une réflexion plus approfondie sur l’entre-
croisement du fantasme et de la matérialité dans la recherche
géographique sur le déclin urbain.
El objeto sublime de Detroit
RESUMEN
Si hay un objeto que caracteriza el creciente interés de los
geógrafos humanos por estudiar las ruinas del pasado reciente, es
la estación central de Michigan en Detroit. Si bien ninguna ciudad
se ha utilizado con más frecuencia como modelo para el declive
urbano contemporáneo que Detroit, su estación de tren en ruinas
se ha convertido en el símbolo global del ‘ruin porn’, a menudo es
criticado por estimular la imaginación del espectador en lugar de
tener en cuenta lo que ‘realmente’sucede en la ciudad. Sin
embargo, en este artículo, argumento que el ruin porn no crea
una fantasía de ruina, sino que, por el contrario, elimina el espacio
para la fantasía. Basándome en la teoría psicoanalítica, exploro
cómo los observadores de ruinas locales convierten la estación
central de Michigan en lo que Jacques Lacan llama un ‘objeto
sublime’, un resto de pérdida que desencadena una fuerte nostal-
gia. Posteriormente, reviso cómo el ruin porn ‘desublima’la ruina al
exponer su materialidad ‘desnuda’, y cómo la primera reapertura de
la Estación Central de Michigan durante su renovación ‘resucita’el
objeto al proyectar un regreso de Detroit en sus paredes en ruinas.
En conclusión, llamo la atención hacia una consideración más pro-
funda del entrelazamiento entre fantasía y materialidad en la
investigación geográfica sobre la decadencia urbana.
Introduction
Human geography and other related fields constantly develop a rising interest in doing
research on the ruins of the recent past. ‘We seem to be in the midst of a contemporary
Ruinenlust’, as DeSilvey and Edensor (2013, p. 465, italics in original) aptly put it.
Expressions like ‘ruins of modernity’(Dawdy, 2010; Hell & Schönle, 2010), ‘industrial
ruins’(Edensor, 2005; Mah, 2012)or‘new ruins’(Kitchin, O’Callaghan, & Gleeson, 2014;
Martin, 2014) are all markers of this ‘pleasure’in studying the leftovers of our time. The city
of Detroit sits at the heart of these debates. No city has more often been used as
a blueprint for contemporary urban decline (Apel, 2015; Arnold, 2015; Millington, 2013;
Safransky, 2014; Scarbrough, 2016; Vergara, 2016; Wells, 2018). The case of Detroit plays
a crucial role in a variety of engagements with new urban decay, and there is one ruin that
repeatedly appears in these debates: the Michigan Central Station.
As Detroit’s‘single most awe-inspiring civic structure’(Apel, 2015,p.82)andthe‘world’s
most photographed abandoned building’(Wells, 2018, p. 15), Michigan Central Station has
attracted more public attention in the last years than any other ruin worldwide. Mentioned
in almost every book that has been published on Detroit from the 1990s until today,
Michigan Central Station became ‘America’s most famous ruin’(Vergara, 2016,p.29)
throughout the 2000s, when the narrative of Detroit as a ‘dead’city developed. It was
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described as ‘a forlorn headstone marking the remains of a buried civilization’(Galster, 2012,
p. 17) and Detroit’s‘gravestone’that stands as a ‘mocking symbol of its lost greatness’
(LeDuff,2013,p.81).Soonitbecame‘the iconic image’of the city and a mecca ‘for all
photographers of Detroit ruins’(Apel, 2015, p. 82, italics in original). Books, calendars,
websites and newspaper articles are filled with photographs of it, and the Wikipedia page
on the genre of ruin photography features a picture of it as well. Indeed, the shadow of
Michigan Central Station is everywhere’(Kinney, 2016,p.135).
When it was opened in 1913, Michigan Central Station was the tallest train station in
the world, and Detroit was one of the most prosperous and wealthy US-American cities of
the 20th century. Designed by the same architects who designed New York’s Grand
Central Station, the train station was built in two parts: a Beaux-Art-style ground level
that forms the train station and a modern-style office tower with eighteen stories on top
of it. In the wake of the crisis of Fordism and political riots motivated by racist police
behavior in 1967, Detroit gradually shrank by more than half its population. Seventy-five
years after its opening, the last train left the train station. For the next three decades, the
structure became an attraction for urban explorers, scrappers, homeless people, artists
and journalists. Billionaire businessman Manuel ‘Matty’Moroun purchased the property
for nearly $100,000 in the mid-1990s to expand his land ownership by the river, situated
next to the ruin. During the 1990s and 2000s, Detroit became a refuge for creative types
and ‘do-it-yourself urbanism’, and in recent years, million-dollar investments led to wide-
spread claims of the city’s‘comeback’. Whole districts are being demolished, rebuilt, and
renovated to make space for a new Detroit, whose dimensions can hardly be predicted
yet. In June 2018, Ford Motor Company purchased Michigan Central Station from Moroun,
with plans to turn it into one of their new headquarters.
The Detroit of today is full of ‘contested imaginaries’(Fraser, 2018) and even though
the city is in the middle of a massive restructuration process, the ‘ruin imaginary’is still
one of the most powerful ways of perceiving Detroit. Following Dora Apel (2015), the aim
of this ruin imaginary is to mentally master the horrifying nature of ruins by turning them
into romantic and picturesque objects of sublimity. The most common and contested
expression to take this ruin imaginary into account is ‘ruin porn’. Born in Detroit, ruin porn
became in the last ten years the master-signifier to describe the ‘fetish for the exploration
and photography of dereliction’(Garrett, 2014, p. 270), as well as to point to the superficial
use of ‘images of derelict buildings in Detroit . . . as representative of the condition of the
city itself’(Herscher, 2012, p. 294). By turning ruins into objects of obscene fascination,
ruin porn has been proclaimed to be ‘the new sublime’:‘While terrifying mountainscapes
defined the seventeenth century sublime, the twenty-first century has carved a new
incarnation of the sublime, precariously located within contemporary ruins of the urban
wild’(Lyons, 2018, p. 1). In the Vice article from 2009, which first coined the term ‘ruin
porn’, journalist Thomas Morton responds to this term by directly referring to the
exploiting use of Detroit’s ruined train station:
The Michigan Central Depot is a hulking, bombed-out turn-of-the-century train station that’s
constantly used by papers and magazines as a symbol of the city’s rot. The only problem is,
aside from looking the part, it doesn’t have too much to do with any of the issues it usually
gets plastered above. It’s owned by a billionaire trucking tycoon, not the bankrupt city; it was
shut down back in the 80s, not because of any of the recent crap . . . In addition to being
a faulty visual metaphor, the train station has also been completely shot to death . . . Each
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1065
time I passed by I saw another group of kids with camera bags scoping out the gate. When
Ifinally ducked in to check it out for myself, I had to wait for a lady artist from Buffalo,
New York, whose shtick is taking nude portraits of herself in abandoned buildings, to put her
clothes back on. (Morton, 2009)
There is a consensus among scholars that the ‘pornographic’gaze on ruins is problematic,
because it ignores the social relations behind the imposing nature of the ruin itself. While ruin
porn supposed to show us all the dirty details of ruination, it overlooks ‘aglaringomission:the
social reality’of the city (Arnold, 2015,p.331).Scholarsthusdismissruinporn,becauseit‘has
ashockingbutultimatelydullingeffect, and does not, in the end, promote a more sustained
contemplation of the inevitable place of decay’(Cairns & Jacobs, 2014,p.6).To‘see the
objective of ruin imaginary as the production of pleasure .. . leads to no new insight or
knowledge’,andthosewhotakeruinporn‘at face value’contribute to this ‘problematic
concept’(Apel, 2015,p.24).
The basic argument underlying these critics is that ruin porn has to be rejected because
it does not reflect the actual reality of the place. Ruin porn, in this sense, creates a ‘fantasy’
of ruination without accounting for what ‘really’goes on in the city. It overlooks and
displaces reality. It distorts our view and prevents us from seeing things clearly. In the
following, I will engage with this argument by giving the issue of ruin porn in Detroit
another twist. I argue that, especially for local perceptions of the city, the ‘problem’of ruin
porn it is not that it creates fantasies of ruination, a ‘ruin imaginary’, but rather that it
eliminates the space for fantasy. To pursue this argument, I engage with psychoanalysis,
which teaches us that we cannot separate fantasy and reality because ‘“illusion”structures
our (social) reality itself’and ‘its disintegration leads to a “loss of reality”’ (Žižek, 1991,
p. 71). The only way to properly understand what is ‘problematic’about ruin porn is to first
understand the role fantasy plays for the place where the ruin is located. By considering
how fantasies structure the way people gaze at ruins like Michigan Central Station, we can
understand why it is problematic to expose their ‘naked’materiality.
Following the call for geographers to ‘supplement visual representations of ruination
with ethnographic and first-person accounts of places on the ground’(Martin, 2014,
p. 1037), this article investigates ruin gazing in Detroit by drawing on three fieldtrips
between 2015 and 2017, during which I conducted semi-structured interviews and
participant observation. Throughout the last decade, Michigan Central Station became
an important attraction for people to visit, with up to one hundred people coming to see
the ruin every day. Against this background, one part of my research was to study
Michigan Central Station through long-term observations at the site. I spent up to eight
hours per day in front of the ruin, speaking to people who came to see it. In addition, the
material for this article is based on a deeper analysis of Detroit’s ruin photography, as well
as an engagement with the actual plans to reinvent the building.
This article draws on previous work that aimed to nominate the ruin as an outstanding
object for psychoanalytic geographies (Pohl, 2018,2019). However, although psycho-
analytically informed expressions like fantasy, pleasure, perversion, fetish, desire, anxiety
or death drive regularly appear in the scholarly engagements with ruination, they are
mostly used as buzzwords and often miss the point of these concepts. So far, the scientific
work on ruination is a good example of what Felicity Callard (2003) has called the ‘taming
of psychoanalysis’. Ruin scholars primarily use psychoanalytic vocabulary to substantiate
1066 L. POHL
claims that could have also been made without referring to psychoanalysis. In contrast,
my focus lies on the potential of psychoanalysis to shift our understanding of the matter,
and I assert that future engagements with ruination have to address psychoanalysis, if
they want to stop what Siobhan Lyons (2018) calls the ‘overwhelming tendency to
trivialize ruins’(p. 9).
To elaborate my argument, the article is structured as follows: In the first section,
I provide an outline of the basic principles underlying my psychoanalytic geography of
ruins. Psychoanalysis is built upon the subject’s encounter of loss, castration, negation,
and revolves around a reflection on how the subject, through fantasmatic references to
objects, attempts to master this loss. As such, psychoanalysis paves the way towards an
understanding of the subject’s attachment and detachment to ruins. Subsequently, in
the second main section, I explore the different ways of ruin gazing with regard to
Michigan Central Station. I capture the ways ruin gazers engage with the ruin as
a sublime remainder of loss. I argue that Detroiters have a love-like relationship with
Michigan Central Station, that is based on the ruin’s distance and unapproachability.
Then, I engage with ruin porn and demonstrate that ruin photography activates this
pornographic view, which constitutes a problem especially for the local perception of
Detroit. It gets ‘too close’to Michigan Central Station. Ruin porn leaves nothing unseen
and therefore ‘desublimates’the object by turning it into a vulgar object, ‘abject’,an
excremental leftover. I finish the main section by focusing on the first reopening of
Michigan Central Station in June 2018. I point to the covering of the ruin's derelict walls
through inscriptions of anew vision for Detroit. This constitutes what I call
a‘resublimation’. Loss is here reinscriped into the ruin in a commodified way to call for
the comeback of (the lost) city. I conclude by calling for deeper consideration of the
intertwining of fantasy and materiality in geographic research on urban decay.
Psychoanalytic geography of ruins
. . . subject is by definition nostalgic, a subject of loss. (Žižek, 1993, p. 41)
On one of the first afternoons I spent in front of Michigan Central Station in May 2015, an
old man sat down next to me on the grass. He asked me what I was doing there, and I told
him that I came from Germany to do research about this ruin. He looked at me incredu-
lously and said: ‘This ruin has no future’. Even though new windows had just been
installed and we could hear the construction noise coming out of the property, the
man seemed sure that there would be no comeback. As we stared at the giant monolith
in front of us, he said, ‘You should watch World without Humans, a documentary series by
National Geographic. There you see, how little of us will remain once we are gone’.He
laughed, then stood up and walked away.
The man’s comment reflects the common perception that the contemporary rise of
ruin porn is intrinsically related to the ‘apocalyptic times’we are living in today. While ruin
porn finds its historical origin in the ‘sublime romantic landscapes of ruined abbeys’,
Joanna Zylinska (2017) points out that ‘the visualization of ruins has gained a new
inflection in the Anthropocene, a period that is said to be suffering from a dual “eco-
eco”crisis: the current global economic crisis and the impending –and irreversible –
ecological crisis’(p. 9). Detroit has for years been described as a city that vanished to make
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1067
space for a ‘return of nature’, and so it is hardly surprising that the city plays a crucial role
in creating ‘dystopian imaginaries’(Millington, 2013, p. 291) of the end of the world. As
the ‘headquarters of ruin porn’(Cairns & Jacobs, 2014, p. 183), Detroit became a primary
location to depict ‘surviving in the postapocalyptic landscape’(Apel, 2015, p. 132), its ruins
inspiring picturesque dedications ‘to the fetishization of ominous and sublime End Times’
(Arnold, 2015, p. 334). In the introduction to the edited volume Ruin Porn and the
Obsession with Decay, Lyons (2018) argues that the term ‘ruin porn’is in this sense
justified, because it relates to the human attachment to death: ‘Since the sublime was
always acquainted in some way with the threat of death, its alliance with the notion of
ruin porn is unsurprising and essential. Indeed, such images retain something of
a Freudian death-drive’(p. 2).
Although it is a misreading of the concept of the death drive, this quote nevertheless
serves as an entry point for a psychoanalytic reading of ruins. While the death drive is
often perceived as a human obsession with death, psychoanalysis insists that it is not an
‘instinct to return to the state of equilibrium of the inanimate sphere’(Lacan, 1992,
p. 212). Sigmund Freud (1981) introduced the death drive as being crucial to under-
standing subjectivity and society not because it refers to the end of life but rather to its
beginning. As ‘an impetus to return to an originary traumatic and constitutive loss’
(McGowan, 2013, p. 13), the death drive takes place precisely at the moment when the
subject becomes a subject of desire. It is the concept that allows us to understand the
‘conservative nature’of the subject (Freud, 1981, p. 36): why the subject strives to
‘enjoy’what it does not have, and why the subject enjoys things that cause it distress.
Against this background, the death drive relates to what psychoanalysis calls
‘castration’.
While castration is key for every engagement with psychoanalysis, one has to bear in
mind that it has barely anything to do with a literal loss of the penis. By linking castration
and desire, Lacanian psychoanalysis emphasizes that castration is key because it estab-
lishes the fantasy of a state prior to castration, which is necessary for the subject to
determine its desire.
At this earlier historical moment, subjects enjoyed a direct relation with their privileged
object and achieved a perfect satisfaction. We exist in the aftermath of a fall, and from the
perspective of the fall, we can see the possibilities for complete satisfaction in the world we
have lost. (McGowan, 2013, p. 42)
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, every subject is a postapocalyptic subject, whose fantasy
is based on a world that disappeared with its emergence. Although the subject never
experienced this moment when ‘things were alright’, because the subject is in-itself ‘lacking
in being’(Copjec, 1994, p. 182), this reference to a pre-castrated (or pre-apocalyptic) state
allows its fantasy to circulate around the desire to overcome this lack. Lacan’s name for this
illusion of going beyond castration is ‘the Thing’,das Ding. In psychoanalysis, the Thing
refers to the pre-castrated union of the child and its mother. The mother is ‘the prehistoric,
unforgettable Other, that later no one will ever reach’, and desire is an effort ‘to reproduce
the initial state, to find das Ding’that gets lost in the separation from her (Lacan, 1992,p.53).
Being located in what Lacan calls ‘the Real’, the Thing is absent and yet still productive in the
way it organizes the reality of the castrated subject.
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What we experience as ‘reality’discloses itself against the background of the lack, of the
absence of it, of the Thing, of the mythical object whose encounter would bring about the full
satisfaction. (Žižek, 1993, p. 37)
Since the subject is incapable of facing the Thing in itself, because it takes place outside
experience, the only possibility to engage with it is by raising another object ‘to the
dignity of the Thing’(Lacan, 1992, p. 112). The concept with which Lacan designates this
process is ‘sublimation’. Sublimation refers to the possibility of changing the position of
an object from being located outside of the subject to obtaining a ‘position in the fantasy
space’(Žižek, 1991, p. 84). It is a ‘sociospatial’process (Kingsbury, 2011), which allows
Lacan to understand how an ordinary object can start to play a vital role for the subject,
namely, by incarnating a trace of the Thing, thus becoming a ‘sublime object’. While the
Thing is nothing but pure absence, the sublime object functions as a material ‘remainder’
or ‘leftover’of it (Lacan, 1999, p. 6).
Adapting Lacan’s concept of sublimation to ruination means to face the loss taking
place within decay. What distinguishes a ruin from other objects in the city is not its
intrinsic quality but its fantasmatic reference to a state that differentiates the city’s ruined
present from its non-ruined past. Similar to a claim of Cairns and Jacobs (2014), psycho-
analysis therefore follows the premise that ‘the ruin’s positivity depends on what it does
not have’(p. 168). Ruins are never ‘fully’what they are and instead more prominently
consist of what they are not. They are markers of loss that give body to castration.
Ruin gazing and its vicissitudes
One of the first lessons I learned while visiting Detroit is that you cannot speak about the
city without facing its past. While this could be said of most places, it is a particular
obsession of Detroiters to point to the city’s history in order to explain its present (and
future). If you base Detroit solely on ‘what you see’, you do not get the ‘whole thing’. Scott
Hocking, a local artist, describes this way of seeing the city through its past in relation to
the ruination of the city’s present:
Detroiters often refer to a time when the city was the ‘City of the American Dream’, the ‘Auto
Capital’, the ‘Grand City of Detroit’, the ‘Paris of the West’, the ‘Arsenal of Democracy’–there
are all of these nicknames and strong feelings about these factories and businesses just
humming along and being full of people and full of life. The city has been full of people and
full of life, and now you can see these places empty, being reclaimed by nature. I think, for
a lot of people, this is a sad thing, because they are nostalgic for a different time. (personal
communication, 1 May 2017)
George Galster (2012) speaks of a “hyper-“or ‘metanostalgia’(p. 267) that structures the
psyche of Detroiters. The ‘abandonment and demolition of the city’s physical history
created a vast prairie of the imagined past’that led to the ‘dominant, ultimately destruc-
tive “metanostalgia”of Detroit: “Boy, how good it used to be”’ (p. 16). The ruins of Detroit
stimulate a ‘desire . . . to re-experience the bustling metropolis as it is remembered or has
been described’(Steinmetz, 2008, p. 218). As Garett Koehler, a young local entrepreneur,
puts it, ‘Detroit is living in its past, the glory days of its past’(personal communication,
21 September 2015). However, ‘the glory days’of Detroit are ultimately a retroactive
product of the city’s present. While the historical Detroit is something that once was, but
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1069
no longer is, the imagined Detroit of the past comes to life in the ruined present. Detroit is
therefore a primary example for what Alice Mah (2012) calls ‘living memories’. In Detroit’s
decay, ‘we view the present itself as if it were part of the mythic past’(Žižek, 1991, p. 112).
While Detroit is a city of castration, a city that appears to be ‘lacking in being’, ruins like
Michigan Central Station enable us to imagine a state prior to this castration, a pre-
apocalyptic world where ‘things were alright’.
The following quotes illustrate the intimate relationship that locals have with the
ruined train station:
The Michigan Central Station is a special case. We have lots of skyscrapers that were empty for
a long time, but the train station has a special place in the people’s hearts. (J. Gallagher,
Journalist, personal communication, 22 September 2015)
It’s just the One. (B. Giffin, Photographer, personal communication, 10 September 2015)
It’s a thing for everyone . . . I see it and I’m like, “Oh, I love Detroit”. (R. Castañeda-López,
Politician, personal communication, 16 September 2015)
Michigan Central Station derives its iconic function not from its size or location. There are
other (and taller) skyscrapers in Detroit, like the Book Tower Building or the David
Broderick Tower, which were falling apart for years right in the middle of downtown
Detroit (and not three kilometers away from the city like the train station). Michigan
Central Station is ‘the One’because of the ‘special place’it occupies in the fantasy of
Detroiters: ‘It is its structural place . . . and not its intrinsic qualities that confers on it its
sublimity’(Žižek, 1989, p. 221). This place is the empty place of the Thing, the lost city of
Detroit. Therefore, it is also not surprising that Castañeda-López feels ‘love’for the city
when she sees the ruin. Lacanian philosopher Alenka Zupančič(2017) speaks of ‘sublime
love’as a relationship ‘in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or “blinded”by an
abstract dimension of the loved object, so that we no longer see, or can’t bear to see, its
concrete existence’(p. 137). Similarly, one could say that Detroiters love the ruined train
station not for ‘what it is’(its material existence as ruin), but for ‘what it represents’(the
abstract dimension of loss taking place within). Against this background, Apel (2015)
points out why the ruin cannot be approached by everyone:
[R]uin porn . .. depends on a dichotomy between insiders and outsiders, between those who
regard themselves as city loyalists whose lives and work are affected by the city and have
therefore earned the right to profit from it and those whose photos they regard as voyeuristic
and exploitative, feeding offthe city’s misery while understanding little about its problems,
histories, or dreams. (p. 23)
In the following section, I will further develop this differentiation between insiders and
outsiders. While social identities based on race, class, and gender certainly play important
roles in situating ruin gazers (Emery, 2019; Safransky, 2014; Strangleman, 2013), a different
parsing of the social body can be obtained by examining the gaze. When the gaze is
understood as based on one’s particular relationship to fantasy, we can differentiate
insiders and outsiders on the basis of how the gazing subjects situate themselves in
a fantasy structure . People often refer to themselves as ‘Detroiters’whether they were
born and raised within the city limits, grew up in the suburbs or only recently arrived. I do
not seek to judge who the ‘real’insiders and outsiders are. My aim is rather to differentiate
between insiders and outsiders based on their relation to fantasy. I consider insiders all
1070 L. POHL
those who primarily relate Michigan Central Station to the loss it stands for, while
I understand the outsider’s gaze as being characterized by looking at the ruin itself.
Based on my following analysis, I will not only demonstrate that these two positions of
ruin gazing are structurally incompatible, but also highlight that the whole ‘problem’of
ruin porn arises from the fantasy that the ruin embodies.
Sublimation: staying at a distance
During my trips to Detroit, I became friends with a local animation director. In the
beginning of September 2015, he took me on a tour he occasionally offered to his
Airbnb guests to show them around the city. His so-called ‘Post-Industrial-Apocalyptic-
Landscape-Tour’brought us to several abandoned landmarks of Detroit, including the
Michigan Theatre and the Packard Plant, but it started with Michigan Central Station. It
was a sunny Friday afternoon, and after parking in front of the ruined train station, we
walked to the fence that surrounded the ruin, stretching our necks to see through the
broken windows of the entrance portal. As we tried to get a glimpse into the lobby hall,
my friend remarked that ‘the train station of Detroit is the only train station in the world,
which you can only perceive from the outside’. After about five minutes, another car
pulled up in front of the ruin. The window rolled down, revealing a young couple. They
told us that they had just crossed the bridge from Windsor, Canada, and, seeing this huge
structure, had to stop and take a look. My friend laughed. ‘That’s the train station of
Detroit’, he said, and so began his ten-minute monologue about the history of the ruin.
If there is one common theme to the majority of conversations I conducted throughout
my fieldwork in front of the ruin, it is the urge Detroiters have to talk about the train
station. When insiders visit the ruin, they instantly start talking about it. They talk about
their childhood memories and experiences within the building, or their knowledge about
the history of it. They tell you facts about the context, the neighborhood, the developers
and architects, or point to some architectural details or missing materials. They tell you
what it was like to be inside, and how beautiful the interior of the train station looked
‘back in the day’. Lowell Boileau, a local ruin photographer, aptly states that ‘everybody in
Detroit has a train station story’(personal communication, 19 September 2015).
In the end of April 2017, on a pleasantly warm Sunday afternoon, I encountered
a group of people standing in front of Michigan Central Station. A man in his sixties
told me that they were from the east side, and that one of them lived downtown until
fifteen years ago. His female companion interrupted him to emphasize that they were
‘old Detroiters,’laughing. The man pointed to the ruin and said, ‘This is, I mean to us,
an iconic building that always drives us back’. After a short break, he continued: ‘I
don’tlikethenewwindows,though.Imeantheyarewindows,buttheylooklikecrap.
It should be something more authentic to the original’.Acoupleofweekslater,asIsat
in front of the ruined train station again, a man in his late forties got out of his car and
took a picture of the ruin. He asked me what I was doing there, and before I could tell
him anything about my project, he started talking about his memories of the place.
‘When I walk under the bridge of the depot, I can still hear the trains and the smoke
and the people. To come down here as a child back in the days was like going to
Disneyland’. Suddenly, he started shouting about the site’s owner, Matty Moroun. ‘I
don’tknowwhatthisassisdoingwithit’. I asked him if he would like to enter the ruin
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1071
and see how it looks today. He stared at me for a moment and said, ‘Too many people
have already been inside of it. I’mgladthatMorounfinally fenced it off’.
Throughout my research, I often asked locals if they would like to go inside of the ruin,
and barely anyone seemed to be interested. While most ‘outsiders’would do anything to
take a look inside the ruined train station, ‘insiders’prefer to stay outside, often emphasiz-
ing that there is no way to enter the ruin anymore. From a psychoanalytic perspective, this
attempt to maintain a distance can be understood as evidence of sublimation, because
when we talk about sublimation, ‘the inaccessibility of the object is posited as a point of
departure’(Lacan, 1992, p. 149). What ‘drives’people to go and gaze upon Michigan
Central Station again and again is the death drive: the compulsion to repeat the failed
encounter of the Thing, aptly referred to as ‘Disneyland’, a place full of satisfaction.
Here, we can adopt the distinction between ‘aim’and ‘goal’Lacan (1998,p.179)
refers to, when he discusses the death drive. Lacan argues that the drive is not
defined through the goal of reaching an object, but through the way one circulates
around it. While it is quite evident that the missed encounter of the ruin plays
a certain role for the people standing in front of Michigan Central Station, it becomes
even more clear in the way that visitors drive their cars in circles around the ruin to
view it from all angles. During my visits, local friends and interviewees took me
several times on such rides, which usually started in front of the ruin. From there,
they drove east along a small side road, turned right and stopped on a small bridge
over the railroad tracks. At this point, they often told me to get out of the car,
because from here one has a good view of the ruin and the former train depot. After
this, we would turn right onto another small side street to cross the tracks again, this
time driving underneath them. Sometimes people stopped here again to show me
the location of the entry paths that were formerly used by trespassers to enter the
ruin. From there, we drove further to come back to the front of the ruin –where the
driver would sometimes ask me if I would like to start the tour again. The rides
around the train station are a striking example for the strange situation that
a subject, prevented from achieving its object of desire, ‘can nevertheless find
satisfaction in the very circular movement of repeatedly missing its object, of
circulating around it’(Žižek, 1999, p. 297). Although the train station is out of
reach, there is a certain enjoyment to circulate around it.
To approach Michigan Central Station as a sublime object, we are not allowed to
get ‘too close’to the ruin, but to enjoy the curvature that limits our view of it. This
view ‘gives us simultaneous pleasure and displeasure: it gives us displeasure because
of its inadequacy to the Thing-Idea, but precisely through this inadequacy it gives us
pleasure by indicating the true, incomparable greatness of the Thing’(Žižek, 1989,
p. 229). The problem with choosing inauthentic windows for Michigan Central
Station as well as the suffering experience of not knowing what will happen to the
ruin in the future are therefore intrinsic features of the sublime gaze, because in both
cases, the viewers encounter the ‘pleasurable displeasure’derived from the gap that
separates the ruined train station from the lost city of Detroit. Detroit is inadequately
represented by the ruin, yet it is precisely this inadequacy that indicates the true,
incomparable greatness of the lost city.
1072 L. POHL
Desublimation: ruin porn and abjection
Based on the previous discussion of the insider’s gaze of Michigan Central Station, there is
one characteristic of this sublime object I consider to be crucial, and that is the inability to
show the ruin ‘as a whole’:
The sublime object is an object which cannot be approached too closely: if we get too near it,
it loses its sublime features and becomes an ordinary vulgar object –it can persist only in an
interspace, in an intermediate state, viewed from a certain perspective, half seen. (Žižek, 1989,
p. 192).
Regarding Michigan Central Station, this means that every approach that tries to capture
the ruin ‘too closely’ends up distorting the ruin’s sublimity, and I will demonstrate in the
following section that this is exactly what happens in ruin porn. In its attempt to show the
thing ‘as a whole’, ruin photographers traverse the fantasy of ruin gazing in Detroit.
If there are two publications that define the ruin porn of Detroit, they certainly are The
Ruins of Detroit, by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, and Detroit Disassembled,by
Andrew Moore, both published in 2010. It is primarily through these works that Detroit
became ‘an epicenter for ruin gazing and image making’, which is why they are consid-
ered to be ‘the two most defining books of this contemporary vision of Detroit as ruin’
(Kinney, 2016, p. 54). The Ruins of Detroit in particular has been called ‘[t]he most well-
known book of Detroit ruin porn’(Scarbrough, 2016, p. 10). However, it is striking to note
that the photographers consider themselves as outsiders. In an interview, Marchand and
Meffre reflect on this by stating that they came to Detroit to look at its ruins ‘with an
outsider’s eye’(O’Hagan, 2011). Interviewing the two French photographers myself,
I asked them about the role of Michigan Central Station for their work on Detroit:
When we first stumbled upon images of the Michigan Central Station, it . . . immediately
appeared to us like an icon of modern ruins. The scale of it, the display of neo-classical
elements such as the columns and pediments, mixed with the colloquial high-rise behind of
it, it looked to us almost like a photo-montage, it was just striking. You got the classical
European antic-inspired architecture and the American-looking building that come on top of
it, not quite mixing well in fact. And obviously there was the decay and the beautiful arched
broken windows. It was really a whole story by itself. (personal communication,
1 September 2018)
According to the photographers, what turns Michigan Central Station into an intriguing
object of attention is not the greatness of the lost city embodied in its debris, but the
intrinsic quality of the ruin itself. There is no need for loss to turn the ruin into an icon,
because it is ‘a whole story by itself’. Taking a closer look into the two milestones of ruin
porn, one realizes that the view ofthe ruin’s interior spaces forms a significant component of
ruin porn. While Marchand and Meffre (2010,p.38–40) include two photographs taken
inside the lobby hall and one in the underground level, Moore (2010,p.4–7) chose two
shots of the ground level; the first one pointing the way out of the lobby hall and the second
picture pointing toward the inside of it. None of the indoor photographs in the two books
show people, all images were shot in wintertime, and are predominantly set in grey tones.
The ruin appears to be a giant empty ice palace, deprived of its architectural glory after
being stripped from its valuable materials and covered by graffiti.
Camilo José Vergara (1999)writesinanearlyportraitofMichiganCentralStation:‘In Detroit
nothing arrives or leaves from the formerstation;onlytheimaginationtravels’(p. 57). One
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1073
could say that the problem arising from these photographs is that they do not allow this
journey to continue. Ruin porn stops the fantasy from traveling. While the insider stands
outside to imagine the past being embodied within the ruin’sunseenkernel,inruinporn,one
experiences ‘how there is nothing “behind”it, and how fantasy masks precisely this “nothing”’
(Žižek, 1989,p.141).Thephotographsconfronttheviewer solely with the vulgar materiality of
the present, which turns the sublime object into its opposite: ‘we learn that there is no Thing
behind its sublime appearances . . . all we will get is . . . the abject’(Žižek, 2000,p.38).
Deriving from the Latin abicere,‘abjection’literally means ‘to throw away’or ‘to cast off,
away, or out’and is mostly used in relation to bodily excrement. In the context of
Michigan Central Station, the abject shows us what is left of all the furniture, the trains,
the people and the history: a giant pile of waste. And while the outsider is able to give
these leftovers an iconic status based on its intrinsic aesthetic value, the insider cannot see
the beauty of decline, since it is not the object itself that fixates the desire of the insider,
but the loss, which is missing in the abject. In her influential essay Powers of Horror, Julia
Kristeva (1982) states that the abject is ‘edged with the sublime’but refers to
a fundamentally different ‘moment on the journey’(p. 11). While sublimation creates
a longing for the mythic loss prior to castration, the abject makes it impossible to maintain
this longing. The abject erases the ‘breathing space’(Žižek, 1989, p. 137) between past
and present, and points to a moment of anxiety, where desire ends and the ‘lack happens
to be lacking’(Lacan, 2014, p. 42). Thus, what gets lost in ruin porn is the loss itself.
Resublimation: the commodification of loss
On a weekend in the middle of June 2018, Ford Motor Company, the new owner of
Michigan Central Station, decided to open the ruin to the public for the first time since its
closing in 1988. The lobby hall was prepared for this event: all the trash disappeared, most
of the graffiti was removed, and light installations were placed to cast the space in a warm
light. But the most eye-catching change was a series of digital visualizations that deco-
rated the dilapidated walls. Giant letters ran through the entire lobby hall, and the walls
were covered with numerous signifiers that related the great past of the city to the vision
of its future. Using touchscreens, visitors could control which slogans they wanted to see
projected on the walls of the train station. Options included ‘Never Forget Your Roots’,
‘Make Corktown Great Again’,‘Hope’,‘Maker City’,‘We Believe’,‘Sentinel of Progress’,
‘Detroit vs. Everybody’, and so on.
I consider these visuals as ‘artificial obstacles that suddenly hinder our access’to the
raw materiality of the ruin (Žižek, 1994, p. 95). Through these projections, the visitor was
able to literally ‘overwrite’the ruin’s vulgar materiality. The function of the visuals was to
engage with an ‘abstract dimension’that, again, enabled visitors to not ‘fully’see the ruin
itself. They introduced ‘a pure semblance devoid of any substantial support’(Žižek, 1993,
p. 38), which is exactly what is needed for the abject to turn into a sublime object again.
Through this semblance, the abject was resublimated, because even though the ruin
gazer had physical access to the ruin, he/she did not see the walls as such, but what these
walls are standing for: the Thing.
The significant change between the sublimation, which we have traced out before, and
the resublimation, which takes place throughout the first steps of reinventing Michigan
1074 L. POHL
Central Station, is related to the possibility of recovering the lost Thing –a change related
to commodification:
Lacan identifies the lost object . . . as what orients the subject’s desire even though the subject
has never had it. But in capitalism the lost object . . . appears accessible in the form of the
commodity. (McGowan, 2016, p. 26)
Throughout the reopening of Michigan Central Station, the ruin not only becomes, again,
a remainder of the lost Detroit, but also a fantasmatic anchor point to recover this loss and
to overcome castration. It is no longer an object that allows our imagination to travel to
Detroit’s glorious past, but more importantly, an object that enables us to imagine
adifferent future. The empty place of the Thing becomes supplanted by the commodity
form in order to bring the lost city back to life.
From a psychoanalytic standpoint, this idea of Detroit as a ‘comeback city’appears to
be rather problematic. Since the Thing is only a retroactive product, there is, strictly
speaking, no way to ‘bring it back’. The Thing has never been lost in the first place. ‘By
insisting that loss is constitutive for the subject, psychoanalytic thought works to combat
nostalgia and its poisoning of contemporary politics’, as Todd McGowan (2013, p. 40)
aptly puts it. Similarly, one could say that a psychoanalytic reading of Michigan Central
Station allows us to combat the contemporary local politics in Detroit by stating that
whatever the future may hold for Detroit and Michigan Central Station, it will never live up
to the nostalgic fantasies of the ‘good old days’. To that extent, it is true that ‘Michigan
Central Station had never looked better and will never look better than when it was at its
most neglected’(Vergara, 2016, p. 281).
Conclusion
This article set out to demonstrate that the ruin is an outstanding object for geographic
research, because it allows to critically investigate the intertwining of fantasy and materi-
ality within the manifold sociospatial realities of a city. Ruins derive their radiance not so
much from their intrinsic qualities, but rather from the standpoints from which we look at
them. They are prime examples for what Wilson and Bayón (2017) call ‘fantastical
materializations’, eliciting a need for a psychoanalytic geography of urban decay.
To psychoanalyze the different ways of gazing upon a ruin helps us to understand why
‘[t]he same object can function successively as a disgusting reject and as a sublime,
charismatic apparition’(Žižek, 1991, p. 143). One of the key features of the object in
psychoanalysis is that it either appears ‘too much’or ‘too little’: Being ‘veiled or disguised’,
it serves as the cause of desire, but as soon as it ‘lacks the veil’s adornment and is
experienced in its nakedness’, it triggers anxiety (Swales, 2012, p. 113). Following from
this, the ruin derives its sublimity only when it is half-seen. The ruin turns into a sublime
remainder of loss, a gateway to another world where ‘things were alright’, when its gazers
can maintain a distance to it. Lacanian philosopher Mladen Dolar (2015) states, ‘there is no
“full frontal nudity”of the gaze’(p. 129), because as soon as the sublime object is
perceived in its entirety, it loses its support of the fantasy. When the ruin is approached
too closely, it reveals the traumatic insight that there is nothing about the object that
justifies its role as a remainder of loss. By shifting our standpoint, the ruin turns into ‘an
object like all the rest, an object that can be rejected or exchanged’(Lacan, 2017, p. 145).
SOCIAL & CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 1075
The common critique of ruin porn, as introduced in the beginning of this article, is that
it is incapable of representing the richness of the ruin’s (social) reality. From
a psychoanalytic standpoint, it is necessary to insist that we cannot reach this richness,
if we do not engage with the fantasies that maintain the stability and order of reality, and
the crucial issue with ruin porn is that it neglects these fantasies. While a psychoanalytic
reading of ruins agrees that ruin photography cannot offer us full insight into the ruin’s
social reality, because the sublime object ‘cannot be grasped in the image’(Lacan, 2014,
p. 254), it highlights that the ‘problem’of ruin porn is not that it shows us ‘too little’but
that it shows us ‘too much’. Adapting a formulation by Lacanian theorist Joan Copjec
(1994), ‘[t]here is no –or strikingly little –fantasy space in these [ruin] photographs, that is,
no virtual space suggested by the figures . . . The photographs are precisely cut offfrom
such a space, which would only be generated if the . . . [ruin] were to occupy the place of
the [sublime] object’(p. 113).
Ruin porn is therefore, like every sort of pornography, ‘inherently perverse’(Žižek, 1991,
p. 110), because it erases the lack that would allow the ruin to turn into a sublime object.
In perversion, ‘there is no lack at the perceptual level –there the world is full’(Fink, 1997,
p. 168). Similarly, the world of ruin porn is a ‘full world’, a world without castration, solely
circulating around the ‘naked’materiality of the present. Ruin porn leaves nothing
unseen: ‘it is only we who gaze stupidly at the image that “reveals all”’ (Žižek, 1991,
p. 110). If there is no lack, there is strictly speaking also nothing to lose, which is why Lacan
(2014) states: ‘For the pervert, things are . . . in their right place’(p. 49). This is precisely
what generates the struggle between insiders and outsiders of ruin gazing. While the
outsider looks at the ruin solely based on its material qualities, the insider insists that the
ruin is ‘more’than that. This struggle somehow resembles the relation between the
neurotic and the pervert: The pervert exposes ‘the very place where the neurotic struggles
with accepting the loss that symbolic castration entails. The pervert feeds on the anxiety
of the neurotic’(Feher-Gurewich, 2003, p. 202).
Although ruin porn and nostalgia are often considered as two sides of the same coin,
a psychoanalytic reading allows us to claim that nostalgia is the ‘opposite pole’of
pornography (Žižek, 1991, p. 111). While nostalgia is rooted in absence, pornography is
all about presence. Thus, it is correct that ruin porn helps ‘to obscure’the social reality of
a city like Detroit, but the problem is not that it places the city ‘in a mythic past rather than
a vivid present’(Millington, 2013, p. 280). Instead, ruin porn is incapable of taking into
account the ‘mythic past’that structures the city’s social reality. There is something
missing in ruin porn, and that is the possibility to miss something. While Lyons (2018)
postulates that there is ‘an overwhelming tendency to trivialize ruins’(p. 9), one could
argue that it is also trivial to frame ruin porn as ‘the new sublime’. Since ruin porn faces the
ruin in its ‘full frontal nudity’, it loses sight of the sublime object. But instead of going
deeper into what it means to gaze at ruins as sublime or pornographic objects, scholars
tend to dismiss taking expressions like ruin porn ‘at face value’and engaging with ‘the
objective of ruin imagery as the production of pleasure or arousal’, proposing that this
‘leads to no new insight or knowledge’(Apel, 2015, p. 24). If there is one discipline that
encourages us to take ruin porn at face value, that would be psychoanalysis. From
a psychoanalytic standpoint, ruins cannot be understood without understanding how
the production of pleasure and arousal (add: dreams, desire, enjoyment, anxiety, etc.)
1076 L. POHL
shapes the very ‘objectivity’of ruins. Psychoanalysis offers a silver bullet against the
trivialization of ruins, because it takes seriously the fantasy that a ruin embodies.
Acknowledgments
The author is very grateful to Paul Kingsbury, Steve Pile, and his working group at the Department of
Human Geography in Frankfurt for providing very insightful and challenging discussions of an
earlier draft of this article. He also thanks the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful critiques
and comments as well as Gavin Brown for his great editorial support.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
ORCID
Lucas Pohl http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7944-301X
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