What in Australia is called the global financial crisis subverts our assumption of rational progress based on economic reason+technology+ free markets. That constellation--called neo-liberalism--- has bequeathed to us a legacy of destruction which looks set to increase into the rest of this decade.

The wake of destruction caused by the wrecking ball of finance capitalism calls into question the sovereignty of instrumental reason. This sovereignty is typically defended by denouncing irrationality, by which is meant anti-intellectual emotionalism, vague intuitionism and prejudice.

How do we explore the other side of reason--the darkness in a mutable world that it fails to lighten? This other space is often referred to as the aesthetic of decay associated with Dylan Trigg. I've begun to explore this space this way:

Others, such as Lynn Smith, explore it in terms of ruins in urban spaces. Usually ruins photographed are abandoned asylums, derelict factories, and decayed piers

Trigg says that these have:

been reduced to aesthetic artifacts and that alone, Roman, Grecian, and other such ancient ruins can no longer serve as objects which subvert our philosophical assumptions concerning rational progress. This is not to say that their aesthetic merits perish with this absence of discordance. Instead, it means that they have been entrenched, so domesticated, in the sphere of the heritage trail.