The website web.archive.org, known as « The WayBack Machine » (Kahle, n.d.) or the time machine, has the primary objective of preserving and archiving web pages since 1996, allowing us to observe the evolution of the internet. One can enter a website’s URL and view its previous versions. Though not exhaustive, this tool has a massive database of over 916 billion pages. It helps preserve traces of the internet’s past and reinforces the idea that everything published online no longer entirely belongs to us; once something is uploaded, it is, in one way or another, permanently and indefinitely available, or at least has the potential to be retrieved. Of course, the massive influx of incoming information means that many things are lost in the flow, and to function, this online archiving service requires a complex plurality of automated and human actions. One could say that this search against the current of the incoming flow offers us a contemporary and digital form of ruins.
Indeed, ruins exist at the intersection of present erosion and preservation, thus valorization of the past. However, their definition can be more complex than a mere crossroad between past and present. They are known as witnesses to the passage of time upon reality. The concept of reality has posed numerous challenges to those who have attempted to define it. For Kant, reality is divided between the phenomenon—what is perceived through our senses and structured by our understanding—and the noumenon, the thing-in-itself that exists independently of our perception but remains unattainable (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Alain Renaut and Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, Paris, Gallimard, 1990, original edition 1781, pp. 73-85). Thus, for Kant, our experience of reality is always mediated by our cognitive faculties, and absolute reality eludes us. On the other hand, Lacan conceives the Real as a raw dimension, inaccessible through language and impossible to fully symbolize. It is that which resists the symbolic and the imaginary order, a form of radical otherness that escapes representation and confronts the subject with the unspeakable (Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1973, Seminar of 1964, pp. 53-64). Despite these diverse conceptions, reality shares common points in these approaches: it exists independently of the one perceiving it, but our access to it is always partial and mediated.
Yet, behind its dimension as a solid and concrete foundation upon which everything is built, reality also constantly eludes us, much like the air that surrounds and penetrates us yet remains infinitely difficult to grasp. It is easy to understand why air is elusive due to its invisible, intangible, and unstable nature, but what makes reality so subtle? Obviously, reality is not just the world as it is and as we materially perceive it, but also its temporal dimension, which makes it a total collective and individual experience. Each individual experiences the world in a unique and ever-changing way; this experience is shaped by human consciousness and its relationship with the world. According to Heidegger, we are not mere external observers but active participants engaged in a profound relationship with our environment; the observer’s existence is inseparable from the world surrounding them—what he calls being-in-the-world (Dasein). And what being-in-the-world suggests is that reality encompasses not only material and tangible objects but also our subjective perceptions, lived experiences, emotions, and interactions with others (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, French translation by Emmanuel Martineau, Paris, Gallimard, 1986, original edition 1927, pp. 91-122).
Thus, because reality, as being-in-the-world, is intrinsically linked to our existence and our constant interactions with an evolving environment, it is subject to continuous escape and perpetual movement, making it elusive to the point that one could define it as « moving information. » It is this dynamic nature of reality that makes preservation projects, such as The Wayback Machine, all the more arduous.
What is done is done. We cannot change or modify what has been done. We may act on the results of past actions, but not on the actions themselves. The repair of a broken object does not erase the fact that it was broken in the first place. What is lost becomes accessible only in a previous version of the present—in other words, the past. Since the past cannot be changed, it is therefore immobile; from moving information, past reality becomes static information. This gives us two aspects of reality: the present, a flow of moving information that tells us everything is ephemeral, and the past, unchangeable and therefore eternal. In a world where reality is a multitude of continuous information exchanges, could ruins be the dead nodes of these exchanges—transmitters of static information but no longer receiving any, like a conversation that has ended on one side? They would still be part of this flow of reality but would be differentiated by their one-way transmission.
If a certain immaterial form of the past is eternal and immobile, ruins remind us that even what appears frozen in the collective imagination continues to be transformed. A ruin left to itself inevitably erodes, falling victim to time, the elements, and its own internal weaknesses. Louisette Priester, in her work, explores the « life » of materials on a macro and microscopic scale, showing that their degradation is embedded in their very nature; their internal lives determine their present and future lives (Louisette Priester, Materials, Paris, CNRS, 2008, p. 123). Marble, concrete, and wood all carry within them the seeds of their transformation. Thus, ruins oscillate between apparent immobility and a life of silent, almost imperceptible destruction, which is nonetheless inevitable if left to run its course.
Actions taken, histories unfolded, cannot be undone, even if their consequences may be null, temporary, or altered. They are eternal, but their effects and echoes fade.
Active witnesses to the past, ruins transform under the action of time. They increasingly resonate with the notion of trace as developed by Jacques Derrida, both participating in a process of différance—a play of differences and deferrals. Différance is a concept developed by Derrida to express that meaning is never fixed or fully present but is constructed through differences between signs and is constantly deferred in time. By playing on the spelling of the word « difference, » Derrida emphasizes that meaning arises not only from distinctions (differences) between elements but also from the fact that it is always postponed (deferred), never entirely completed or accessible in the present moment. Thus, every sign refers to another, in an infinite chain of references, making meaning always in motion, elusive, and in the process of becoming (Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1967, p. 93).
For Derrida, the trace represents what remains of an absence, never fully present nor entirely absent, challenging the idea of a stable origin. As he approaches it from a philosophical perspective linked to deconstruction and language theory: « The unmotivated nature of the trace must now be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a de-motivation, and not as a given structure » (Ibid, page 93).
We can thus consider ruins as a certain type of trace corresponding to these terms. They are unmotivated because they were not intentionally left to become what they are; their state results from natural and historical processes beyond any will. The ruin is an operation, an active movement, because maintaining it in a stable state requires constant intervention, counteracting its natural tendency toward decay. It undergoes de-motivation as it continuously moves away from its anchoring and origin, its meaning evolving over time and through interpretations.
The erosion of ruins can, of course, be material, but it is not limited to that. Indeed, grammatology, linguistics, and etymology all study certain aspects of language, and etymology resembles a kind of archaeology of words and their meanings. If these studies have no end, it is because language is both in motion and alive, while the numerous and diverse forms it can take are mortal. This is partly what fuels linguist Jean-Pierre Minaudier’s passion for languages: « A grammar generally contains a few pages on the origin and relationships of the studied language » (Jean-Pierre Minaudier, Poésie du Gérondif, Paris, Le Tripode, 2024, page 47), but « […] it is above all about dreams and poetry » (Ibid, page 19). Learning a different grammar can prove to be, beyond a laborious task, « an invitation to discover the other. » He writes: « Thus, in 1987, an ethnobotanist informed his linguistic colleagues that during his research deep in the Nepalese jungle, between two exotic rhododendrons, he had just encountered a speaker of Kusunda, a poorly documented language believed to be extinct. Ten years of intensive research under sometimes epic conditions led to the discovery of half a dozen more speakers: it must be said that these former hunter-gatherers were in the process of leaving the said jungle, undergoing rapid deforestation, to settle in villages and take up farming. Some agreed to travel to Kathmandu, where linguists reconstructed the essential grammatical system » (Ibid, page 38).
Through their differences, foreign grammars are not easily accessible to the layperson, and the less accessible they are, the more distant they seem—without necessarily referring to physical space. Endangered languages, facing extinction due to a lack of intergenerational transmission or cultural and linguistic dominance, carry within them a displacement that renders them exotic, distant, progressively placing them outside of what we know, outside of what belongs to our current context.
The more we explore what defines ruins, the more they differentiate from the dead knot, which defines itself as the entry point into total inexistence: like birth, no, like an inverted conception, even more concrete in its immutability and immobility than death.
Hence their power of fascination: as the famous quote from Heraclitus states, « One never steps twice into the same river » (Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragments, translated and commented on by Marcel Conche, Paris, PUF, 1986, Fragment 12, page 151). These traces, these unmotivated and de-motivated movements that are ruins, can allow us to achieve the impossible—or at least to dream of it as closely as possible by offering us a frozen fragment of this mysterious river. This paradoxical tension, in which the apparent stillness of the ruin nonetheless reveals the persistence of movement—the movement of time that has shaped it and continues to erode it, of the present that endlessly flows to become eternally frozen past—echoes the Angelus Novus by Paul Klee, as interpreted by Walter Benjamin: « There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth open, his wings spread. This is what the Angel of History must look like. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which ceaselessly piles ruin upon ruin and hurls them at his feet. He would like to pause, awaken the dead, and piece together what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the heap of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress » (Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, IX. Collected Works III, translated by Maurice de Gandillac, Folio Essais, page 434).
What makes ruins beautiful is both everything that cannot be seen in them, everything that has been lost, destroyed, and at the same time, what remains and can be glimpsed—what has resisted, what has been preserved. The mystery persists in these two facets of the same coin, and ruins raise fundamental questions: what a miracle that we have access to this window, to this frozen fragment of a river—how many storms, histories, and changes has this vestige survived? If so much of the original structure and its surroundings have been destroyed or altered, what is it that allowed this remnant to persist? How was it determined what fades, what endures—which of these traces will erode and which will leave their imprint? And their logical extension: what traces, what ruins will remain tomorrow, and what will they allow to be forgotten?
The entire subject of ruins is paradoxical : perpetual change makes the present elusive, even though its temporal neighbors—the past, the near or distant future—which are ultimately only extensions of itself, are even more so, and by far.