Ruination as invention: reconstructions of space and time in a deindustrial landscape

This dissertation argues that the symbolic force of deindustrial Rust Belt decline is expressed through patterns of rhetorical invention, what I call ruination rhetorics. Ruination, I argue, works to construct divergent orientations toward space and time in representations of the Rust Belt. I trace these orientations as a way of charting the contours of how we understand domestic urban decay in our contemporary political and economic climate. This project argues that ruination's inventive force hints at a number of thematics including: ruination as urban waste; ruination as a claim to forms of nostalgia and authenticity; ruination as a linkage between temporal configurations of the past and the present; and ruination as a narrative form enabling what I call a "melancholic" rhetorical style. In all of these instances, ruination supports differentiated orientations toward time and space, creating temporal and geographical connections and boundaries through rhetorical manipulations. In this way, the times and spaces of and for industrial ruination shift, and in so doing, their discursive manifestations elucidate the diversity and instability of spatio-temporal structures. Conceptually, I argue that ruination shapes an understanding of space and time as fluid concepts, rather than stagnant or pre-determined categories. And by unpacking the ways that ruination traffics in representations of Rust Belt geographies and citizens, we discover an increasingly complex discursive field out of which meaningful relationships to decay and renewal might be forged. In this way, ruination does not weave a cohesive narrative of what the Rust Belt is, where the Rust Belt is, or who does or does not lay claim to its political realities and challenges. Rather, its divergent and contradictory modes of rhetorical invention suggest ruination expresses the incoherencies and compatibilities constitutive of an everyday life lived in the ebbs and flows of a material space that is always-already a site of ongoing decay and renewal.