Chapter 4 Phenomenology of Trash (original) (raw)
Related papers
AT HOME IN AN UNHOMELY WORLD: ON LIVING WITH WASTE
Detritus, Volume 6, 2019
Modern-day waste, such as the microplastics in the water, particulate matter in the air and chemical waste in the soil, distorts notions of inner and outer, of familiarity and strangeness, of own and other, and turns our world into an unhomely (uncanny) place. This paper explores what it means to live with waste instead of trying to make it go away. When we explore the ontology of waste, we find that waste is never un-ambiguously (in the) present and invites us to take "being" as haunted and explore a "hauntology" (Jaques Derrida) of waste. This hauntology refers to being as ecological being or "being ecological" (Timothy Morton) and invites us to inquire after the "eco" in ecology: the Greeks oikos (home). When, as this paper suggests, we take co-habitation as a starting point, it becomes unclear who is the host and who has come to visit. Whose home takes central stage? And whose world? This paper argues we need to let go of an overarching concept of "world" and instead become familiar with (our) "habitat" and in so doing open it up to the non-humans we share our home with. Sticking with the metaphor of (un)home(liness) this paper argues that our house is a haunted house and explores ways in which we can become hospitable with these (unwelcome) guests.
Towards a semiotic definition of trash
Sign Systems Studies
The phenomenon of trash has rarely been addressed in the cultural theoretical literature. However, its structural similarity with the concept of taboo as well as its role in the dynamics of culture has been stated. Current paper aims to summarize the partial contributions that have been made so far, localize them in a larger semiotic framework, and deriving from Lonnan's approach to culture suggest a few further ideas for a semiotic definition of trash. It is proposed to define trash as a phenomenon marking the boundary between culhlre and non-culture/nature. In the context of the deepening environmental crisis (to which accumulation of trash contributes) a semiotic approach opens a new perspective for identifying the origin of the problem in our mind/culture rather than in nature.
Chennai is a cosmopolitan, transnational South Indian state capital, generating over 5,000 tons of solid waste per day, primarily disposed of in two refuse dumps situated atop wetlands. Waste is defined here, following Gidwani and Reddy, as “a mobile description of that which has been cast our or judged superfluous in a particular space-time. It is a technical and political artifact that gathers force in its performativity” (2011: 1649). Waste is tangible, visible matter. But it also influences, in its presence and absence, the political economy and ecology of the city. This paper is not an analysis of the (mis)management of waste in Chennai, but an inquiry into the economic and cultural values of waste; waste simultaneously embodies plenitude and scarcity, despair and hope, worthlessness and value, repulsion and compulsion. Waste is not a thing of zero value, but a complex social fact representing chiasmically intertwined dualisms, that culturally transforms—in its presence and absence, invisibility and visibility—the urban landscapes of Chennai. The paper contributes to a long line of literature exploring the cultural economy of waste, asking, what do the transformations in value of waste tell us about cultural and individual values in Chennai? How do human-waste relationships reflect and reproduce interclass and caste tensions? The paper is based on an ethnographic study conducted from May to August 2013 in Chennai, and draws on semi-structured interviews of 30 middle-class residents of gated communities in Chennai as well as on semi-structured and informal interviews of domestic laborers, conservancy workers, informal waste workers, and other key informants (e.g., waste management officials, environmental activists).
Work, waste and cleanup: narratives about a global/local social action to "clean up" the planet
SN Social Science, 2021
Over the last half century, social practices and relationships have changed but human labor has maintained a central role. In the global south, neocolonial capitalism is steadily advancing, extending and naturalizing an extractive social regime of natural, bodily and social energies. In this framework, the present communication proposes to approach a global/local experience oriented to clean up public and "natural" spaces. In methodological terms, quantitative data from specialized bibliography, journalistic and institutional publications and field notes are used to reconstruct the intervention/research framework. In the first section, some conceptual relationships between work, identity and sensibilities are established. Then, a brief characterization of social policies related to urban hygiene and waste recovery in the city of Rafaela (Santa Fe, Argentina) is made. Third, the 2019 edition of the World Cleanup Day, promoted by "Let's Do It" Foundation and proclaimed as "the largest civic action in history" is presented. On the one hand, the visions and versions of the world (sensu Bourdieu) of the organizing agents construct a narrative about "planetary salvation". On the other hand, the adaptation of the action to the local reality and the participation-observation as part and witness, allowing to discuss the globalizing narrative. The final section is devoted to revisit the relationships established and to reflect on the continuities and changes of global/local actions of this type, opening up questions for future research.
The Other Side of Society. Reflections on Waste and its Place
2016
This paper presents us with waste; buried, burnt, flushed away, it nevertheless lies at the very heart of our (all too?) material culture, its presence a malodorous affront to what we call “society”. In reading in its decomposing forms the “spirit” of a people that once inhabited and enlivened it (Pels 1998, p.91), my argument is that theories of material culture prevent anthropology taking waste seriously enough. Through the work of Mary Douglas and Daniel Miller, I explore how waste draws our attention how the “animism” implicit within their theories of the social remains complicit in the problematic separation of a lively world of human sociality – even one enlarged to include all our “stuff” (Miller 2010) – from the non-social, pre-given world of “brute” materials (Tilley 2007) from which it is constructed. Yet waste itself teems with other, much more than human, kinds of life that gesture beyond this limiting anthropocentrism, towards the metabolic approach elaborated in the se...
Sympathy for the abject: (re)assessing assemblages of waste with an embedded artist-in-residence
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2019
The assemblages of (post)industrial neoliberal society include the production of vast quantities of post-consumer materials categorized as waste, which for many appears to vanish from everyday spaces. But rather than make it disappear in any final sense, recycling and disposal processes simply move it in new forms into new places within the global flows of waste. In urban contexts, the abject category of waste must be expelled from the sanitary spaces and subjectivities of daily routines, yet its corresponding absence in everyday perception obviates the urgency of action. One approach to unbundling the abject residue of contemporary society without instigating castastrophic rupture of social orders is through the aestheticization of the expelled. Artists working in the realm of abjection can serve as agents disrupting and redefining boundaries and social imaginaries of the status quo. In this paper we examine an artist-in-residence at the Edmonton (Canada) Waste Management Centre, arguing that the Deleuzian assemblages erasing the material consequences of garbage can be short-circuited in a municipal setting by redistributions of aesthetic experience. In this case, the artist residency embedded in human and mechanical assemblages of waste disposal allowed the artist to transform materials into an aesthetic spectacle recategorizing the abject as sympathetic and a vital component of social and spatial discourse.
Intimate with your junk! A waste management experiment for a material world
The Sociological Review, 2019
The material turn in social theory has put the study of objects at the centre of any attempt to comprehend the production of social order, but only recently has their affectivity become an important issue. Even in Science and Technology Studies (STS) where objects have been approached as 'actants' that actively participate in the material composition and decomposition of various socio-natural orderings, their affectivity has seldom been explored. Diverse scholars from feminist and STS areas stand out for bringing to the fore the affective entanglements between humans and non-humans as constitutive of various ecologies of knowledge production. Our contribution here aims to pursue this further in relation to practices of maintenance, conservation of, and the discarding of everyday objects. We propose the notion of 'intimate entanglements' to explore how objects come to matter to us, what makes us care for them, and how they might become companions and our mutual interdependent supporters. Through an artistic research project called 'Objections', we asked participants to donate discarded everyday objects and interrogated them about their reasons for keeping, and the conditions under which they chose to keep and maintain, certain objects, while discarding others. We hoped that the notion of intimate entanglements would enable us to approach various 'objectual' biographies as stories of companionship and becoming with these objects, where the self is accounted for as a figure that holds and is affected by encounters with the multiple. The consequences that this material shift may have for the political ecology of waste and maintenance studies will be explored in this article, which promises to elucidate some of the ways that waste management systems operate today and perhaps suggest some alternatives.
Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 2003
This paper reviews the contribution of the book 'The Garbage Society: Caciquismo in Mexico City'; written 20 years ago when no official statistics on garbage production were available, to the development of sustainable waste management practice in Mexico. At that time public information was extremely difficult to obtain and environmental pollution was not regarded as an important research area for many disciplines, including social sciences. The objective of 'The Garbage Society' was to provide a detailed description of all the stages involved in garbage disposal from the time when it is discarded, until it resurfaces in recycled products. This process can be summarized as Garbage'/Working force 0/Merchandise. The garbage problem in Mexico City is an accurate reflection of the Mexican political system that has traditionally supported corporatism in which caciques (a person who exercises absolute power over a group) play a key role. Current data are used to verify the events of that first study and through reflection on the historical process, to indicate the requirements for ongoing research as a means of clarifying and categorizing the inherent problems associated with sustainable waste management in Mexico.