Trigg (research student, U. of Sussex) takes on our enduring image of time and progress by offering a model of post-rational aesthetics in which what we believe about spatial order is challenged by an affirmative ethics of ruin. Working through the effects of post-industrialism as well as post-modernism, he considers memory, place and nostalgia as he builds the case that the decline of reason allows for a new critique of "progress." The majority of his work delineates dissolution and its inevitability, using as evidence the ruins about us, such as the phenomenology of the derelict alleyway and the function of aesthetic revulsion, including the fact that ruins function as space and center and eventually as home. He associates the end of the postmodern era with the aesthetics of the ruins of memory and the complete refocus on what it is to be human. Annotation 2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
