Jake P. Smith's "The Ruin Dwellers"

Jake P. Smith is associate professor of history at Colorado College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Ruin Dwellers: Progress and Its Discontents in the West German Counterculture, with the following results:

Page 99 of The Ruin Dwellers is peculiar in that it serves as the last page of a chapter and only contains two complete sentences. The sentences — which read: “In order to keep the feeling of perpetual breakthrough alive, then, youth activists needed to engage in ever more radical acts of transgressive destruction and consistently widen the scope of negation. As the next chapter shows, this strategy proved very difficult to sustain.” — are meant to serve as a connecting thread which gather up the ideas from one chapter and project them into the next. Although rather cryptic when taken on its own, I nonetheless feel that this page does indeed provide the reader with a good sense of the book.

I say this for a few reasons.

First, the lines on page 99 introduce the main protagonists of the book, namely the youth activists of the early 1980s who, taking inspiration from the apocalyptic aesthetics emerging from the punk and New Wave movements and from the forms of domestic world building being cultivated by housing activists, developed novel modes of urban activism and novel ways of engaging with (and critiquing) progressive time.

Second, the lines on page 99 mention some of the central theoretical concepts of the book including transgression, negation, and perpetual breakthrough, all of which point to the book's overarching theoretical interest in the temporal logics of modernity. The overarching argument of the book is that leftist activists in the early 1980s challenged and modified some of the ascendant temporal logics associated with progressive modernity and that the oft-derided temporal shift towards the past evident in late twentieth-century leftist thought and practice should be understood not as a romantic rejection of futurity but rather as part of a critical occupation of the logics of progress, one that explored the potential of what Svetlana Boym has called the “off modern.”

So, while page 99 might not give readers a full sense of the book's arguments, it does indeed reflect some of the book's larger concerns.

Learn more about The Ruin Dwellers at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue