The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish

Feeling uneasy about the structure of much environmentalist critique does not mean that I can avoid analyzing it. When it comes to waste, environmentalism's discursive impacts are significant. Environmentalism in all its varieties dominates representations of wasted things. And while some of these representations are positive, most are not. This broad discursive field has to accept full responsibility for using waste to stage the destruction of the planet. While it's easy to say I want to take a different approach to thinking waste, clearing a space for this has to begin with a careful investigation of how we already know

waste. Existing representations don't just use waste to organize our fears about the end of nature; they also limit how we might respond to this. Fredric Jameson is absolutely right to point out that it's easier to imagine the destruction of the earth and of nature than the destruction of capitalism.¹¹ Our imaginations are overflowing with the horror of waste.

In much environmentalist discourse both humans and nature are configured as sites of loss. Nature is represented as the passive victim of gross exploitation and contamination, a realm of lost purity and sanctity. Humans, meanwhile, are alienated from the natural world, having lost their connection to the physical environment on which their very survival depends. The modern world is a place of dearth and meaninglessness; it has lost touch with community and with noninstrumental forms of reason. Everything is rationalized and calculable, systems of meaning have fractured and fragmented to the point at which people experience an absence of belief. Little wonder, then, that in much mainstream environmental politics waste is a central character in an already well-established disenchantment story.¹² Dumping waste is an expression of contempt for nature. Humans establish their sense of mastery over and separation from a passive desacralized nature by fouling it. The story then goes on to show how this has involved a profound shift in moral outlook from a more connected interaction with nature, in which the status and classification of waste was vastly different (perhaps there wasn't even such a category?), to our current state, in which global pollution and gross wastefulness, or "first world affluenza," signal a profound moral bankruptcy.

What are the effects of these familiar disenchantment stories? Obviously, they are various and complex. I just want to single out those that are relevant to the question of waste and how it is configured. Disenchantment stories shape the representations through which we make sense of the world; they are performative.¹³ Our consciousness is full of these stock images, symbols and metaphors that form a kind of waste social imaginary. This imaginary provides a set of frameworks and ideas that operate in the background to our everyday practices. How that background is experienced is eminently variable; it might lurk as a constant source of guilt or sadness or it might be completely unacknowledged. Social imaginaries are akin to the operations of "discourse" or "mentality." They shape how we come to know and do things, the terms in which the world is made meaningful, but their presence is muted or backgrounded by the effects of embodiment and naturalization.¹⁴

Social imaginaries play a crucial role in the formation of our subjective understandings of waste and the environment. When we hear stories of dying rivers or see images of mountains made of garbage, nature is framed as dead or definitely on its last legs, and it's difficult not to feel a sense of despair or grief. While the political intention of these stories might be to shock us into action, their impact is often overwhelming and immobilizing. They can perpetuate the very relation to nature they seek to challenge: alienated distance and disinterest. When the exploitative force of economic power and human destruction is so overcoded why bother contesting it? You may as well just keep shopping.

My point is not that we need some positive messages as a counterbalance to current waste social imaginaries that will reenchant nature and inspire us. Social marketing has already discovered that feel good messages are more effective than feel bad. Rather, my point is that the very terms in which the culture-nature relation is framed in much environmentalism limit how new relations might be imagined. Disenchantment stories presume a fundamental dualism between human culture and nonhuman nature. No matter how they configure the relation between the two sides, each ultimately stands as ontologically distinct from the other. Each is seen as possessing an essential material difference from the other. This dualistic thinking inhibits any serious consideration of the specificities of waste and our relations with it. It posits a fixed identity for things that has to be protected or that identity is to remain pure. In the opposition of humans to nature that disenchantment stories sustain, waste functions not as what undoes this opposition but as what contaminates both sides. The capacity of humans to destroy nature with their waste renders them morally bankrupt, and the capacity of nature to function as a dumping ground renders it passive and denatured. The destruction of paradise happened not when Adam took a bite of the apple but when he dropped the core on the ground.

Waste can only be bad in this framework; it can only function as that which destroys the purity of both sides of the opposition. It is the thing that has to be eliminated in order to reestablish the essential identity and difference of each category. This tendency to blame waste uses a moral framework to explain the effects of destruction and contamination. Waste makes us feel bad, its presence disgusts and horrifies us, it wrecks everything—in these familiar sentiments badness is located in the object that disrupts purity rather than in

the relation between the person having the affect and that object. In the quest to purify, which Bruno Latour describes as a typically modern strategy, waste has no generative capacities, only destructive ones.¹⁵ No wonder it is so easy to use waste to stage our anxieties about the collapse of purified categories and clear boundaries.

Yet, as Latour also argues, purification goes hand in hand with the rise of translation, or the emergence of hybrid categories that are mixtures of nature and culture. The greater the demand for sharp distinctions between nature and culture, the more inevitable it becomes that an increasing number of things will not fit easily into either category. Could we think of waste as evidence of translation, as part of this proliferation of hybrids? It certainly shows us how mixed up the categories of culture and nature are, how everything contains elements of both. The abandoned car body rotting quietly in the landscape is alive with the activity of corrosion, it's become a habitat, it looks perfectly at home, it's both organic and machinic. The shifting and contingent meanings for waste, the innumerable ways in which it can be produced, reveal it not as essentially bad but as subject to relations. What is rubbish in one context is perfectly useful in another. Different classifications, valuing regimes, practices, and uses, enhance or elaborate different material qualities in things and persons—actively producing the distinctions between what will count as natural or cultural, a wasted thing or a valued object.

If disenchantment stories deny the complexity of waste at the same time as they blame it for contaminating both culture and nature how, then, do they imagine political change? What sorts of ethico-political strategies do they propose for saving both humans and the nonhuman world? In some versions of environmentalism the strategy is to get rid of the bad thing altogether. Banish waste from the new ecological order, because when humans understand their profound connections with a resacralized nature there will be no need for waste, it will become meaningless. Nothing will be wasted; it will be reused and reintegrated into the cycle of life and endless renewal. This approach idealizes nature as a transcendent entity excluding any relation to the immanent realm of bodies and dirt.¹⁶

But would a different culture in which we lived in harmony with nature do away with waste altogether? Doesn't this simply reproduce the idea of waste as phobic objects, as essentially bad? When people declare that there should be no such category as waste a niggling question remains: Don't we need it? What

about the question of otherness or alterity? Isn't the demarcation of a world outside the self how we come to know who we are? Isn't the physical world and its alterity the "very basis for accepting otherness as such"?¹⁷ Versions of environmentalism that emphasize merging with nature make it difficult to understand the function of separation as a distinct relation. Surely, what we reject is as important as what we identify with. Denying the possibility of separation in favor of connection does not allow for the possibility of having different relations with things that we frame as ontologically other. It forecloses the possibility of creating better ways of living with things that we reject as both different and redundant to our lives.

Ultimately, this vision of political change does not help me think about how our everyday ethical relations with waste might be transformed. It privileges a sacred nature as the impetus or motivation for change, and this displaces any serious consideration of how it might actually be waste, rather than "nature" or "the environment," that triggers new actions, that inspires us.

But the sacralization of nature is only one scenario for political change; there are plenty of others that are more modest and more familiar because they are the stuff of social marketing in the name of "environmental awareness and education." How do these campaigns represent waste? How do they configure the political? My aim here is not detailed genealogy. It is simply to examine the place of these strategies in framing or reframing our relations with waste. Across all the different genres of social marketing aimed at changing everyday waste management the mode of address presumes an autonomous subject in possession of free will and reason. This subject is seen as the owner of certain beliefs, opinions, and imaginings that need to be discarded and replaced by better, more ecologically sustainable ones. You might believe that empty bottles and newspapers are worthless rubbish, but they are really potential resources. You might regard food scraps as repulsive decaying matter, but they could be feeding your garden. The waste-making subject is invited to change his or her mind about the status of rubbish and then voluntarily transform his or her actions. These requests for change don't exist in a vacuum. They are meaningful only because of the wider context of disenchantment narratives that are deployed to morally problematize existing practices and beliefs, to justify changes—do it for the environment! And to offer the subject the experience of virtue when he or she does.

We are in the realm of voluntarism here and the assumption that opinions and beliefs are possessions that can be replaced with an act of will. The problem with this approach is that it represents reason as an exclusive property of the mind and denies the place of the body in modes of knowledge. Beliefs and opinions are embodied, they are inscribed in the ways we behave, experience, and feel. Any appeal to change our ways of living that does not take account of how we feel rather than just think about waste, that ignores bodies and the affective sphere, will be seriously impoverished. Responsibility and bodily responses are inextricably linked; modifications in reason alone will not change the character of social life.

Similarly, the invocation in many environmental campaigns of an abstracted "nature in crisis" that we are now morally obliged to rescue can impose senses of duty and obligation on the waste-inaking subject that can easily slide into resentment. Campaigns driven by the logic of moral imperatives can trigger victimization or despair: a sense that the world is unfairly imposing restrictions on your freedom and individuality; or a feeling of being impossibly overburdened with too many things clamoring for your sympathy. But it's not just the fact of people experiencing an excess of moral claims—or compassion fatigue, to use a trendier term—it is also the way in which these claims are made. When nature is represented as dying we are inevitably confronted with finitude. Even when this message is tempered with images of beauty and abundance or yet another spectacular documentary on whales, it takes only one newspaper report on the last three remaining brown-nosed wombats to get that sinking feeling again.

Witnessing nature's demise inevitably reminds us of our own. Whether this is acknowledged, even unconsciously, is impossible to guarantee. The forces of repression are powerful, especially in relation to that which threatens us most. It is easy to remain blind, to turn away, when we have so many fictions to keep death at bay: arrogant self-centeredness, nihilism. Then there is the option of converting the thing that reminds you of mortality into an object of contempt, converting the anxiety and vulnerability that something triggers in you into resentment, and thereby managing its threat—or thinking that you are. Environmental education strategies that identify waste as one of the key culprits in the demise of nature walk a knife edge between activism and resentment. Rather than inspiring positive action and generosity they can easily fuel a politics of fear and loathing, a cavalier disregard for nature that is often ex-

pressed through defensive reassertions of its status as a resource, as that which exists simply to remind humans of their superiority.

While environmental hard-liners reject educational approaches on the basis that they individualize what are really structural and institutional problems—thereby letting government and capital off the hook—my concern is with how a politics based on the imperative to reform the self in the name of nature can easily slide into moralism or resentment, distracting attention from how we actually live with waste and blinding us to the ubiquity of ethical work. In the appeal to make a grand gesture and do your bit to save the world, not only is nature once again subordinated to humans but the absolute ordinariness of managing waste is lost in a haze of righteousness.

Poor waste; environmentalism infuses it with a metaphysical dimension that makes it stand for death. Images and stories about its horrifying presence are used so constantly to stage our fears about the end of the world that its vital place in the care of the self and everyday life is consistently overlooked. In this book I want to redress this situation, to give waste the attention it deserves. My motivation is different from environmentalism in the sense that I do not see a closer analysis of our waste relations as a chance to get in touch with nature. I don't want to explain the need for changes in ways of managing waste in terms of fear and moral imperatives. Nor do I want to recuperate waste, invert its negative value to positive—though I do want to consider examples of its generative role. Standing on the edge of a landfill gives me nausea, not inspiration. Rather than rail against the effects of excessive consumption and a disposable culture (which I could easily do) or let my melancholy take over, I want to take notice of all those abandoned things. I want to think about the complexity of our relations with the material world that wasted things carry as traces on their scratched and broken surfaces. I want to investigate the ways in which objects become waste, the practices of valuing and classification that render them useless. I want to consider the historically specific network of political and cultural relations that organize the open landfill, the sewer, and the recycling bin as distinct technologies of waste management whose effects reverberate across our bodies in our daily rituals of dealing with our selves and our rubbish. The minute you start paying attention to waste a different relation with it is enacted; the chapters in this book enact that attention. They examine the effects of noticing waste, letting it confront us not as worthless detritus but as provocative things that just might make us consider what we do.

How then to think about waste not as phobic objects but as things we are caught up with? Things that are materialized or dematerialized through actions, things that work on us and help us constitute a self? Focusing on how waste figures in our relations with our body and the world means taking seriously dispositions and sensibilities around waste. This makes it possible to see how other relations might surface that make new claims on us, that inaugurate different habits. Recycling and composting are already doing this in their own small way. In the demand to handle our empty bottles or newspapers differently, our relations with these formerly useless things have changed. They have now become residual resource and we have become “environmentally aware.” The ritual of rinsing and sorting has produced a new network of obligations and identities that show that the material specificities of waste are never fixed, and neither is the ethical constituency that feels implicated in it. Waste and bodies and habits are all open to immense variation, and in the emergence of new waste habits, an experiment with another social imaginary, whether it's explicitly identified or not, lurks in the background.

What then are habits and how are they implicated in the formation of an ethical sensibility? Habits are bodily dispositions. They are the way a body is organized and moves; the way corporeality has a social and cultural memory. Pierre Bourdieu describes habits as practical techniques based on a nonspontaneous principle of spontaneity.¹⁸ They are nonspontaneous because memory, social circumstance, repetition, and environment shape how our spontaneous responses and practices emerge. Habits emerge in the relational imprints of meaning back and forth among levels of the body and its environs; their sedimentation confronts us as a kind of second nature. Habits and their repeated performance help form identity, they remind us that a self is made through actions and that different bodies and selves emerge in different practices.

My aim is not to moralize habits, to insist that we change our bad practices. I don't think that bringing morality into play with habits gets you very far. It simply infuses habits with the language of compulsion and demands that we call up our conscience and free will and control ourselves. Habits don't work like that. Habits have a materializing power on both persons and things. They bind us to the world at the same time as they blind us to it. And this is the problem and the possibility of habits: when they break down, when some-

thing goes wrong in their routine operation, we are launched into a new relation with the world. A moralized language of habit assumes that these new relations come from a rational self who has “seen the light.” My claim is that waste and our interconnections with it, rather than abstract human reason, might have more of a role to play in disrupting habits than we ever give it credit. The waste that suddenly claims our attention, maybe by its repulsive smell, maybe by its ephemeral presence on the side of the road, can disrupt habits and precipitate new sensations and perceptions.

This movement of the senses and perception signals the terrain of micro-politics. It reminds us that this is where new techniques and capacities could emerge that change how we relate to ourselves and waste. For philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze ethics revolve around embodied practices and micropolitics of the self. They are grounded in actions and bodies rather than transcendent moral codes, and this incessant activity foregrounds the perpetual instability and ambiguity of norms, morality, and identity. Ethics are fundamental to the multiple processes of subjectification; they allow us to cultivate and organize ourselves not simply in relation to wider rules and moral interdictions but also in relation to “askesis,” or cultivated sensibilities that establish the range of possibilities in perception, enactment, and responsiveness to others. Styles of waste disposal, then, are also styles of self, in managing waste we constitute an ethos and a sensibility. Our waste habits—all those repeated routines—leave their traces on our bodies and our environment.

The world of things and the pragmatic demands they make on us are central to the formation of an ethos. And with the rise of consumer cultures we have come to live with an enormous number of things. The scale of goods for sale and the amount of objects people accumulate have produced very distinct personal and domestic habits. Caring for the self has become complicated and intensified by the sheer density and diversity of possessions. While analyses of the social and economic impacts of consumption have been great for understanding the dynamics of exchange, circulation, and use, they have been less valuable for understanding our relations with the things we get rid of. For all the talk about how we occupy consumer culture there has been a cavalier disregard for the all wasted things that form an enormous part of this way of living. This book argues that it is crucial to make sense of the distinct ethos of waste that underpins consumption, to acknowledge that how we eliminate things is just as important as how we acquire them.

This does not mean that all our waste practices can be reduced to the cultural logic of consumer capitalism—person-thing relations are mediated by a multiplicity of forces. It simply means that commodity relations are one of the significant influences shaping habits of dispossession. And the general character of these waste habits is informed by relations marked by distance, disposability, and denial. Consumer cultures and the technocratic logics of efficiency and concealment have produced a distanced relation with wasted things even as amounts of waste have escalated phenomenally. External systems of removal from garbage trucks to sewers have dramatically reduced the demands waste makes on us. It simply gets taken “away,” and while we know generally where it goes, the invisibility of these places, their location underground or on the margins of cities, facilitates denial or active not knowing. How exactly do the habits that distance us from wasted things become implicated in particular forms of embodiment? What sort of self do these habits shape? And in what ways could an ethos of distance, denial, and disposability be challenged?

I pursue these questions in the following chapters. The answers I develop come from close analyses of a series of strange encounters with waste. What unites these analyses is a desire to think about how unexpected experiences of waste can disrupt habits and trigger new relations and perceptions. My perceptions of waste, what it is, and what we do with it have been challenged by the examples I explore in this book. Sure, I was on the lookout for waste examples, but their impacts could not have been predicted. In trying to make sense of my responses to various wasted things, from the dancing plastic bag in American Beauty to thousands of perfectly rinsed and flattened milk cartons in a recycling depot in Kasaoka in Japan, I have drawn on a diverse set of conceptual and methodological tools. While some might find this heterogeneity unsettling or messy, the examples of waste explored here demanded it. This heterogeneity is a powerful reminder of the range of questions that waste provokes.

Poststructuralist political theory has been immensely important for helping me think through the relations between ethics and affect, and how our waste habits might be changed without recourse to guilt or moral righteousness. I use it in chapter 2, “Plastic Bags,” to compare affective responses to waste (from disgust to enchantment) with the moral rhetoric of a recycling education program. In chapter 3, “Shit,” the history of the sewer and Fou-

cault’s concept of biopower provide important tools for examining how our bodily waste mediates the public-private distinction and produces distinct forms of embodiment. I then analyze how waste becomes a political object. Using the examples of Bondi Beach’s famous POOO Parades and the toilet festivals in the slums of Mumbai, I explore how privacy is publicly constituted and how a changed ethics of waste might involve new meanings for the intimate self. Chapter 4, “A Dumped Car,” looks at person-thing relations using the practices of gleaning and making do. Through the example of two remarkable documentaries about different ways of living with waste, this chapter pursues the question of what might make us notice wasted things and invent different ways of living with them. My analysis draws on recent work in studies of material culture and thing theory to investigate how waste’s materiality might become present to us. In chapter 5, “Empty Bottles,” the rise of recycling is the focus. I look at recycling as a distinct cultural economy that has “enterprised” both waste and subjects. The creation of a new set of socio-technical relations around empty bottles and newspapers involves new habits and bodily performances, new calculations of value, and new discourses about the environment. Finally, in a chapter called “Worms,” the idea of transience is examined through the example of the humble earthworm. What worms and their endless labor breaking things down show is how biological functions can have ethical resonance. In facilitating the transition from decay to renewal, worms display an exemplary relation to loss: they show how waste can be generative. How might we adapt the earthworm’s arts of transience to our own lives? How might we live in a less destructive relation with waste and loss?

So it is on various durable practices and experiments in living with waste that I want to focus in this book, small everyday gestures rather than big political campaigns. This is not to abandon environmental politics but to come at it from a different angle, to ask different questions about configurations of “the political” and to use different tools.

I want to take seriously what it means to “act locally,” and this means opening up a pathway from politics to ethics that makes it possible to consider the place of minor actions and tactics in living with waste. I want to examine the ideas and beliefs that shape social behaviors around waste and how they operate as a kind of second nature, an internalized, embodied set of dispositions that organize practices in certain unconscious ways. This should

make it possible to give putting out the garbage the attention it deserves as a habit and, potentially, an ethic.

We need to get rid of things. Waste is something we all have to manage; beyond biological necessity we expel and discard in the interest of ordering the self, in the interest of maintaining a boundary between what is connected to the self and what isn't. Waste management in all its historical variety is fundamental to the practice of subjectivity. Styles of garbage elimination, then, can be located within Foucault's “arts of existence”: all those actions and rules of conduct through which we organize ourselves according to particular ethical and aesthetic criteria.⁴

The arts of existence also involve habits. Habits locate us not simply in a social context but in a habitat, a specific place of dwelling or position. Our interactions with that place—what we make of it, what it makes of us—generate a mode of being or ethos that structures social behavior, often below the threshold of conscious decision making. Rosalyn Diprose reminds us that the Greek word ethos, defined as character and dwelling, gives dwelling a double meaning as both noun and verb, place and practice.⁵ And from this notion of dwelling as both habitat and habitual way of life the idea of ethics was derived.

These habits are not given: they are constituted through the repetition of bodily acts the character of which are governed by the habitat I occupy. From this understanding of ethos, ethics can be defined as the study and practice of that which constitutes one's habitat, or as the problematic of the constitution of one's embodied place in the world.⁶

For Diprose ethics are not about universal principles and transcendent moral positions. They are about modes of being in the world, or the relations between being and the world; this grounds ethics in a constitutive relation between one's habitat and embodied character, or ethos. But it is not only habitat that is implicated in embodiment, it is also relations with others. These force us to take a position, to establish an identity in and through relations of differentiation with others. And, if the recognition of difference from others is implicated in the constitution of an ethos and identity, so too is the recognition of difference from objects. Through habits we manage the circulation of objects into and out of our lives and reestablish the boundaries of the self, and this is how the cultivation of particular habits of waste removal becomes the cultivation of a particular self.

In consumer cultures everyday waste habits express an ethos of disposability. What ethical criteria do these habits deploy, and what kind of self do they make? How did disposability come to be seen as good? In her history of rubbish, Waste and Want, Susan Strasser gives some answers to these questions. She challenges the assumption that the ethos of disposability is emblematic of 1950s consumerism.⁷ For her, efficiency, cleanliness, and replaceability have been a significant part of modernist culture since the days of paper collars in the 1860s. The invention of a range of other disposable paper products took off during the latter half of the nineteenth century, when paper became cheaper and more readily available. By the early twentieth century paper cups

and straws were being introduced in the American railway system, the use of toilet paper was widespread in cities, and paper sanitary napkins were gaining acceptance. The appeal of disposable things was dependent on an accompanying discourse about disease and contamination. The rise of packaging, for example, was justified on the grounds that the consumer could be assured that the products were uncontaminated. As the idea of the "invisible germ" began to gain widespread popular attention the modern hygienic imagination grew, fuelling the take-up of these products. As Strasser says, "Comfort and morality united with science as the public learned that dirt and dust carried tiny creatures that caused illness."⁸

But there was also resistance to the rise of disposable products and the ethos of single use. Some people balked at having to pay for paper cups in coin-operated dispensers, others had always brought their own utensils when traveling, then there were those who were not convinced of the germ theory of disease. The modernist principle of purification that disposable products expressed was met with anger and incredulity in some quarters. Many people were hostile to the changes in relations with things that the disposable product inaugurated. They saw it as inefficient and wasteful and a challenge to a widespread ethos of thrift and reuse.⁹

Despite this resistance disposable objects spread as part of the general expansion of consumer culture. By the early 1920s another concept had emerged to justify their use: convenience. Economic rhetoric about efficiency and streamlined production began filtering into the home. This rhetoric was used to promote things like "labor saving" devices, packaged foods, washing powder, and the like—all in the name of freeing the housewife from drudgery and turning the household into a site of fast, competent production. Objects marketed as convenient or disposable evoked a modernist asceticism and temporality in which the technical was valorized for saving time and for its instrumental rationality.¹⁰ Disposable things, like technology, satisfied needs fast and effectively. They helped to make housewives more efficient and to identify the truly modern household; they became markers of social distinction.

Ideas about purification and convenience were central to the promotion of disposable objects. These ideas helped people to develop ethical justifications for the particular habits that the disposable object demanded. They provided the wider discursive context whereby throwing things away came to be seen as both acceptable and normal. While there was a counterdiscourse about

disposability as wasteful and a threat to more careful material relations, these negative connotations were marginalized as throw-away things spread and became incorporated into practices of the modern self and household management.¹¹ Using disposable things was an indicator of one's commitment to new standards of cleanliness and efficiency. These objects conferred status on the user.

But the most significant force fuelling the emergent ethos of disposability was the expansion of industrialization and the growth of mass consumption. This long and profound shift in the organization of economy and experience has been a central focus of modern social theory. My interest is in the logic of the commodity form and its impacts on waste habits. Commodity relations inaugurated major transformations in the structure of identity and the material everyday—the number of possessions people lived with, how they acquired them, and how they disposed of them.

Until recently, most accounts of how we occupy consumer culture have ignored the question of disposal. Yet it is impossible to understand the meanings of consumption as distinct practices of possession and accumulation without thinking about how these practices impact on dispossession. When the waste practices of consumer cultures are analyzed the tendency is to establish a crude causal relation between excess consumption and excess waste: easy come, easy go. While there is no doubt that the massive growth of consumption is directly linked to the massive growth of waste, this isn't much help in thinking about how consumption has changed waste habits; in understanding what this activity has done to the way we relate to things and the way we reject them.¹²

What is it about the structure of the commodity form that makes continual replacement both necessary and possible? Seriality and the fetish of the new provide key insights into this question. Constant change is fundamental to the expansion of markets and the circulation of the commodity form. The repetition of the ever new as ever the same, manifest in the fashion system and rapid turnover in style, shortens the life of the commodity and infuses person-thing relations with the logic of instant gratification. Commodity relations create a distinct temporality of desire that can be described as "never present to the object but always future or past."¹³ In other words, the pleasure of a purchase is always fleeting; the satisfaction of desire that the commodity promises is never complete.

This distinct temporality of desire is linked to the fetish qualities of the commodity. When commodities appear to us as fantastic, animated things with a life of their own it is easy to see why they are so enchanting. These changes in how objects are apprehended are not simply psychological, they are connected to the profound institutional changes that rapidly developing consumer culture inaugurated. Bill Brown describes how the development of the department store created a theatricalized world of goods designed to inculcate desire. Fixed prices removed any need for the human interaction of bargaining and restricted consumption to a relation between consumer and merchandise. In this context objects' sensuous appeal was dramatically heightened.¹⁴ The rise of advertising was equally crucial in nurturing a fascination with the commodity and in normalizing the practice of shopping.

The general consensus in left critiques of mass consumption is that it has led to lives saturated with objects. However, within this material density the capacity to engage with the qualitative character of these objects has diminished. This is because, when use value was replaced by exchange value, people no longer made the objects they lived with. They were distanced from the objects' production and immediate materiality. German social theorist Georg Simmel describes this as the dialectic of proximity and distance, Marx as estrangement and alienation.¹⁵ Both are analyzing the process whereby, despite being surrounded by commodities, we are distanced from the material substance of things. According to Marx, the damage of the commodity form is primarily felt in humans who are deprived of sensuous relations with things and succumb, instead, to crude fetish worship.

The problem with this account, as so many commentators have argued, is that it presumes a true or proper subject-object relation that capital and the rise of the commodity have destroyed. Taken to its logical extremes this critique would have us all weaving our own clothes in a return to preindustrial authenticity. While the idea of alienation is not much help for challenging the ethos of disposability, it does describe an important aspect of how objects appear to us in a commodity culture. The processes of alienation and abstraction objectify both people and things. They substitute the qualitative for the quantitative and mask the unequal power relations that structure how commodities are produced. This "phantom objectivity," as Marx calls it, is also the source of the commodity's fetish qualities, its capacity to seem animated and alive.

These complex processes of objectification and abstraction are at the heart of an ethos of disposability. They shape how we come to desire and accumulate commodities and how we come to reject them. Because we have little idea how commodities come into being, their life after we've finished with them, after their wondrous fetish qualities have petered out, is also of little or no interest. The magical qualities of the commodity obliterate its origin and its final destination. Often this destination may not be landfill; things can move out of commodity status without becoming rubbish. They might begin a life of lonely isolation in the shed or be born again into the gift economy of the charity shop. Chucking away is only one option, but it is an option made easier by the logics of fetishism and abstraction, which distance us from the life of commodities before and after they enter our lives: just get another one!

Single-use objects and commodities reconstituted person-thing relations in different, but related, ways. Both contributed to the rise of an ethos of disposability and the emergence of new waste habits that made throwing things away with little concern possible. Strasser is right in arguing that these changed relations with things had to be acquired and cultivated. But she is somewhat glib in reading these new relations as symptomatic of a "way of life remote from hand production."¹⁶ This analysis reiterates all the problems of the alienation thesis, with its implicit refusal of the commodity and a yearning for more direct and transparent relations with objects.

This is not my argument. Rather, I am interested in how the ethos of disposability constituted waste as ethically insignificant. The kind of self produced through the habit of disposability was a self for whom "waste" had few moral connotations, a self whose waste practices confirmed its sense of mastery over and separation from the world. When commodity cultures redefined the meaning of freedom as "freedom to consume," this also meant freedom to waste. This didn't mean that disposability wasn't problematized in the expansion of commodity culture. Rather, it meant that the terms of this problematization did not involve reflective modification of the self. Before the emergence of environmentalism, the ethos of disposability framed waste as a technical rather than a moral problem, something to be administered by the most efficient and rational technologies of removal. Generally this meant (and continues to mean) dumping: the trash bin, the local dump, and the drain have become emblematic sites for the disposal of anything and everything; these are the homes of waste.

Yet, as anyone who has stood at the edge of a garbage dump or stared down a drain and felt a wave of horror and fascination would know, disposability is a technical and spatial fantasy. Our relations with waste cannot be so easily severed, out of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind. Disposability frames waste habits in terms of straightforward elimination, a necessary part of progress and consumption. This is a relation of mastery that constitutes the self that discards as separate and purified. And in this relation the ethical implications of our complex and shifting connections with rubbish are denied.

It's harder to sell disposability now, perhaps because we've all seen too much rubbish. Waste has become visible, a landscape in its own right. This doesn't mean that disposing isn't flourishing; rather, a different problematization of waste has emerged over the last thirty years that has made trouble for the habit of thoughtless elimination. Technocratic discourses about efficient removal have been challenged by arguments about the moral and environmental effects of waste.

The antilitter campaigns that began in the late 1960s represented rubbish not just as matter out of place but also as morally unsettling, evidence of the collapse of civic obligation.¹⁷ These campaigns linked the individual body to the social body. A favored image in them was (and still is) the disembodied hand in the act of dropping rubbish. This gesture of separation was no longer a sign of individual purification but a sign of pollution. It was evidence of an undisciplined self, unable to regulate its actions in the interests of social and environmental order, a self with no sense of public responsibility. This is how antilitter campaigns problematized the ethos of disposability, by implicating it in environmental and moral decline. Waste was exceeding its limits, it was no longer contained in appropriate places but was everywhere; classificatory boundaries were collapsing. The condition of "the environment" was threatened by the presence of rubbish, and so too were civic values.

These early antilitter campaigns were part of a major shift away from the idea of disposal as straightforward elimination toward the idea of disposal as a process of careful management. Waste is now something to be managed. Disposal has become implicated in a morality less concerned with maintaining the purity of the subject and more concerned with protecting the purity of the environment and establishing the virtue of the careful "waste manager." To

manage waste has meant a reorganization of our relations with rubbish and self. Witness, for example, the phenomenal transformations in domestic waste practices evident in the normalization of recycling, in the instilling of a collective sense of individual responsibility for sorting our rubbish.

In constituting waste as a domain of moral concern, as a field of personal responsibility and careful domestic disciplines, we can see how everyday conducts were problematized and subjected to questioning—and how they were made the target of moral reflection. And it is in the space of the home, in the field of "domestic waste education" and the massive range of campaigns geared at transforming populations' waste practices, that we can see how routines and habits are implicated in particular sorts of subjectivity. In managing our domestic waste according to new principles of self-scrutiny, we are making the self an object of reflection in and through our relations with waste.

Waste is now a field of activity structured by legislated and normative moralities, by disciplinary codes that order conduct in the interests of wider objectives: from reduction of landfill to global ecological survival. It is a domain in which we have come to experience a sense of duty and responsibility for protecting the purity and otherness of the environment. The emergence of a waste management discourse shows how moral problematization has functioned to justify a range of interdictions and self-disciplines that have changed how we dispose of things. This is a technology of governing, a way of guiding conduct whereby we can see the links between the broader political rationalities of waste policy and the microtechnologies of daily life; whereby we can see how permeable the boundaries are between the domestic, the voluntary, and the governmental.¹⁸

And one effect of this is that putting out the garbage has become complicated. No longer the lugging of the bin to the curb a couple of times a week, now it's a complex assemblage of actions: collecting all the papers and cardboard (clean only) and putting them in their special container, rinsing the bottles and cans, removing labels and lids and allocating them to their container, putting the food scraps in the compost or worm farm (no meat), wheeling out the bin for everything else. These practices indicate the impacts of domestic waste education and the ways this has become enfolded with a new conscience about rubbish. And this conscience is a significant element of our attachment to changed waste habits.

There is no question that the demand to manage and minimize waste has come from coercive state programs and structural transformations in domestic waste services. But the success of these changes, in terms of widespread participation across populations, has depended on changes in the micropractices of everyday life, on the ways we've willingly acted on ourselves. This alignment of subjectivity with subjection is governance. But what is so significant about new rubbish habits is that, when questioned, many people claim they are doing it for nature not for the state. They are participating because they believe in some abstracted sense of social and environmental good. They experience recycling and composting as autonomous gestures, as expressions of their "environmentally concerned" identity.¹⁹

What then is the logic of waste education, and how is it implicated in the idea of conscience and new forms of subjectivity? To answer this question I want to consider one example, the New South Wales Waste Service's "Are You a Good Sort?" campaign. The pun on "good sort" reveals how much our relations with waste have become reordered around a variety of new classificatory procedures, the assemblage of actions these demand, and the virtue that is attached to these. We can see here how abstract notions of care and management of the planet are linked to micropractices in the home, to instructions on how we should be around our rubbish: much more attentive, much more dutiful, much more careful than the culture of disposability, as careless disregard, ever demanded.

In the "Are You a Good Sort?" campaign sorting waste means regulating and disciplining personal practices in order to render the self more congruent with particular values like restraint ("Our beautiful city is running out of landfill areas so it's up to all of us to do our bit to help reduce the amount of garbage we throw out"); responsibility ("When shopping take your own shopping bag. Look for products in packs that can be refilled or recycled, and buy products made from recycled materials"); and economy ("All our waste management centers take recyclable materials for free so save yourself and your community a load of cash").²⁰

The macropolitical demand of waste policy, "Let's reduce waste," is successful only when, borrowing from Connolly, "micropolitical receptivity to it has been nurtured across several registers and constituencies."²¹ But exactly

which registers of being are addressed in the "Good Sort" campaign, and which are ignored or denied? In the appeal to restraint, responsibility, and economy, moral reason and judgment are privileged. The play of guilt and obligation are an ever-present subtext as we are extolled to do our bit. This is moral compunction. Obedience to new regimes of domestic waste management depend on a monitoring and disciplining relation to the self. And this relation is successful because it mobilizes conscience, because the rituals and habits of waste management have become implicated in reflexive techniques of the self.

Conscience is a potent reminder of how we make the self into an object of ethical attention; how we problematize and modify our conduct on the basis of ethical principles we aspire to. This particular relation to the self has a history. As Foucault has shown, conscience is a product of a range of techniques of the self that have come to constitute certain forms of personhood. To be a person now means cultivating particular modes of reflexivity. It means developing special ethical techniques and capacities, or "techniques of conscience."²² These techniques and capacities are historically variable in their form and targets. Their presence is evidence not of a foundational interiority grounding the subject, but of shifting modes of living and self-cultivation. Human abilities can be ordered and understood without recourse to introspective moral problematization.²³

Post-Foucauldian accounts of subjectivity reject metapsychology and its presumption of fundamental laws of interiority. Interiority is not a psychological system, nor is it the core of being. It is, according to Deleuze, a historically contingent discontinuous surface.²⁴ In the final two volumes of The History of Sexuality Foucault subjects interiority to radical critique. He investigates how relations to oneself and to others constitute subjectivity and how principles of internal self-regulation change. A central concern in this work is what happens when formerly esoteric ethical and spiritual practices are taken up by large-scale institutions such as the church and then bureaucratic states. This is the terrain of the government-subjectivity relation, in which relations to oneself become implicated in larger agencies of social regulation and power. When, according to Deleuze, "the individual is coded or recoded within a 'moral' knowledge . . . above all he becomes the stake in a power struggle."²⁵ This is the point when subjectivation becomes subjection, when power in the form of control and discipline becomes implicated in daily life

and interiority. It is the point when subjects become tied to an identity by conscience and other techniques of moral self-knowledge and regulation. This is the point when we become guilty.²⁶

The "Good Sort" campaign shows how processes of self-regulation and conscience shape our relations with waste, how circuits of guilt, self-reproach, and virtue have become enfolded with our intimate acts of disposing. The problem is that the "Good Sort" campaign's representations of rubbish practices deny other ways of being with waste. Waste habits are represented as flat, static, and mechanical, and easily altered with appeals to reason and conscience. There is no room for disgust or horror or pleasure or resentment. No room for movement between different registers of subjectivity or for any recognition of how changes in practices of the self may affect other ethical sensibilities. This type of moral instruction forecloses any possibility of understanding shifting forms of being in our relations with waste. Rubbish relations still mean mastery and control; we may have become more careful and attentive with our waste, but it is still absolutely and unquestionably separate from the self, something to be gotten rid of. Recycling and other new waste habits could be described as virtue-added disposal.

Unacknowledged in the "Good Sort" campaign are the implications such practices may have for our ethical and affective sensibilities around waste. Yet, in the demand to handle and sort our waste responsibly and to make aspects of it visible on the street, prior and entrenched senses of order and self-cultivation may well be unsettled. A letter to the editor of a local newspaper about hating recycling captures this tension beautifully:

While in favor of recycling, the new, excessively complicated arrangements fail to cater to the needs of households in the following ways. The provision of four garbage receptacles is an eyesore and results in problems of storing these receptacles close to the street as well as out of direct vision. They are a major cause of visual pollution and convey a Third World appearance with garbage bins lining our streets. . . . These decisions are not in ratepayers' interests, despite the noble ideals which were possibly behind them.²⁷

There is no doubt that this writer is uncomfortable with recycling. Stuff "noble ideals"; it's messy, offensive, and primitive. Beyond irritation there is the sense in which the disciplines of recycling contest the stability of the self.

They make trouble for existing forms of self-artistry and cultivation not simply through the privileging of a "third world" aesthetic but also through the affront to deeper and more visceral registers of being. The letter goes on to describe the sense of loathing and disgust experienced when rubbish sticks to the bottom of the bin as a result of constant compaction by householders desperate to make all their waste fit in the new half-size containers. Then there are the effects of dogs and wind disturbing overfull bins. Being aware of the moral pressure to recycle does nothing to lessen the horror of it all because, for this writer, judgment is a product of much more than rational argument.

Unlike the "Good Sort" campaign this letter gets to the heart of waste's relationality. Having to manage waste under this new regime disturbs identity. If waste is one of our most immediate others, and establishing our difference and separation from it the condition of possibility for a self, then its persistence, its refusal to go, is a primordial threat to the drive for wholeness. The self exists only in relation, but rubbish practices based on expulsion and elimination maintain the fantasy of separation and sovereignty. New waste habits disrupt this. Not only do we have to handle our waste much more, it sticks around longer and aspects of it become public. The implications of this for this letter writer are more than guilt and resentment about an imposed moral duty; they are about the ethical effects of recycling practices on habits and sensibilities. They are about the unsettling impacts of recycling on the micropolitics of the self. They are about encounters he doesn't want to have.

The implied references to aesthetics and abjection in this response to recycling reveal the heterodox nature of ethics and their relative autonomy from wider social and governmental regulations. This letter describes an experience of ethical discontent that emerges from a waste ethos constituted around aesthetic rather than environmental values. For the aggrieved letter writer the rules and domestic disciplines that recycling programs demand harbor no opportunities for artistic practice.²⁸ In fact, they disrupt the relations between order and beauty, aesthetics and ethics that are fundamental to his arts of existence; hence his resentment. He can feel the pull of moral reason. He has a conscience about waste but he also has sensibilities, disciplined forms of sensuousness that are seriously offended by these practices. He isn't mourning the planet, he's mourning the pleasures of disposal free of macropolitical governmental restraints.

If we accept that disposal is necessary, how could it be recast in ways that acknowledge the ethical significance of rubbish without generating moral righteousness or resentment? Domestic waste education campaigns seek to reorder conscience and habits around waste in certain ways. But this plane of macropolitical organization, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, exists in a relationship of tension and negotiation with other planes and dimensions of being.²⁹ Deleuze and Guattari's insistence on the plurivocity of being, on the multiplicity of dimensions, lines, and directions, signals how movements of becoming and immanence fragment the normative work of macropolitics. It also signals an ethics that has little to do with rule-bound moralities.

In his readings of Foucault and Spinoza Deleuze is concerned with forms of being that exist beyond or in the interstices of guilt and conscience. In seeking to restore ethics to explorations of ways of living and the molecular in-between of subjects, he privileges ethical practices that depend less on external authority, such as state disciplines and prescriptive moral codes, and more on cultivations and sensibilities. Deleuze's metaphor of the fold is central to this ethics. The fold presumes not simply a self in relation but also a self without any essential interiority. The inside is an enfolded of the outside; folds incorporate without totalizing, internalize without unifying; they make spaces, surfaces, flows, and layers. "Subjectivation is created by folding, by bending the outside through practical exercises."³⁰ And, Deleuze argues, even though Christian technologies of the self may have transformed the person into a site of subjection, subjectivation persists in those spaces and folds in which the relation to oneself resists being codified by agencies of power-knowledge: "The relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise."³¹ Deleuze's use of resistance does not imply some essence of the self called agency or whatever. Rather, it signals sensibilities and intensities moving below and within those folds of the self that are implicated in modes of obligation to various forms of authority.

Deleuze's account of enfolded has been taken up by theorists of governmentality.³² In seeking to understand the relation between the forms of truth in which being is problematized and the habits and practices through which we shape our own and others' conduct, this work effectively decenters notions of conscience, rule, and authority. It allows us to see how governing in all its permutations and variations is doubled, or implicated in modes of ethical re-

flection and practice. Yet, as useful as this work is for thinking about rule as a form of enfolded, it seems to involve a very partial and particular reading of Deleuze. Studies of government allow us to see how conscience is a mode of obligation to rules and norms, how the "fold of the relation between forces according to a particular rule" constitutes us as governable subjects.³³ What they are less able to see are those forces of ethical life and being—those encounters, visceral movements, and differences—that initiate other possibilities for subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or what Connolly calls the movements of becoming.

So it is to Connolly's rich and suggestive dialogue with Deleuze and Nietzsche, particularly in chapter 3 of Why I Am Not a Secularist, that I want to turn in order to see how new ethical possibilities around waste might be initiated. For Connolly's question is not that of the governmentality theorists—how codes of morality and normativity are enfolded with particular habits of being. Rather, Connolly asks how new identities and ethical attachments can emerge out of the unexpected energies and disturbances that unsettle being. How does being operate in a paradoxical relation of tension and interdependence with the movements of becoming?³⁴ Connolly argues that conscience and other code-driven moral techniques are crude and blunt tools for coping with the world. Their tendency to ground moral actions in law, god, global survival, consensus, or any other categorical imperative makes them blind to the ambiguous and disturbing aspects of most ethical encounters. The moral weight of codes and doctrines turns obligation into duty, guilt, and resentment: "I should do this . . . because the environment is suffering, because I am law abiding, because I am virtuous." This is obligation working in the interests of mastery and self-certainty, obligation that undermines senses of ethical connection in order to maintain the stability of being. This is obligation as a moral technique that suppresses the visceral and the situational.

Yet, in the new experiences of obligation to our rubbish that recycling and composting have initiated, the visceral is ever present and palpable. We may act out of concern for the suffering of the environment, out of duty and guilt, but we are also touching and sorting that which has lost value, is rotting, and is in a state of irretrievable decay; we see the end of mastery, we see becoming. And our responses are shifting and surprising. The compost bin becomes a site of beauty and fecundity—all those worms, all that soil in the making. The spilt rubbish spread over the footpath after pickup gives you a shudder of

aversion way beyond mere irritation. Why is that such a disturbing sight? These moments of intensity surprise and unsettle, they reveal a responsiveness to waste circulating through every dutiful and correct practice. And it is in these moments of responsiveness, these currents of movement and affect within the self, in the self's relation to otherness, that Connolly locates the politics of becoming.

Connolly's argument about responsiveness resonates with Deleuze and Guattari's idea of the body as a plane of affects: "Affects are becomings. . . . We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body."³⁵ For Connolly, responsiveness is a condition of possibility, it opens up lines of mobility and difference within the self, and it is something that can be cultivated. An ethos of critical responsiveness connects becoming to various practices of self-modification. It involves work on the self in the interests of recognizing the plurivocity of being and denaturalizing identity as stasis or essence.³⁶

What, then, would an ethos of critical responsiveness look like in relation to rubbish? Has it not already begun with the new waste regimes that we now practice? Yes and no. The moral problematization of waste has established new relations of obligation and duty with our rubbish, it has initiated different responses to it, but these still generally appeal to categorical moral imperatives: global ecological survival, the care of the planet. The regulatory disciplines involved often sit uneasily with other sensibilities and micropolitics of the self, as the letter on hating recycling shows. In other words, domestic waste education privileges a fairly restricted set of responses to waste, and these are inextricably linked to the constraints of moral codes, which too easily slide into moralism. Guilt, resentment, and anxiety are not politically productive. Sure, they may have mobilized people to change their habits, but they inhibit other responses and possibilities, other ways of being with waste. A politics of becoming does not proceed from guilt. It proceeds from a critical responsiveness, critical in the sense that those intensities and affects in the interstices of guilt and conscience awaken us to our own becoming.

So much waste education secures an obligation to new techniques and habits by insisting that the threat of waste be mastered: reduced, reused, recycled. This fantasy of control establishes the responsible self as separate from the world. It maintains an absolute alterity of waste and blinds us to an aware-

ness of how our relations with it are fundamental to the very possibility of life. Mastery inhibits the possibility of seeing in waste our own unremitting unbecoming. But it is never complete or successful, as responses of unease or pleasure or grief reveal. And surely it is here, with these openings and intensities, that different ethical relations with waste could be established, that obligation could become responsiveness.

I can think of only a few waste education campaigns that presume a pleasure and generosity in waste: celebrations of composting and a campaign run by Brisbane City Council called "Enjoy Your Garbage." In composting campaigns organic waste is often represented as beautiful, its formless disorder reconstituted as an aesthetic of abundance; scraps, discards, leftovers becoming soil. Then there are slogans like "What you don't eat your garden will." The play here is on sameness, on the similarities between self and garden, on exchanges that connect. Composting is framed as a gift; in cultivating a sensibility for it we are cultivating a waste ethos that proceeds from generosity rather than guilt.

The "Enjoy Your Garbage" campaign was more ambiguous. It involved putting that slogan on garbage trucks, in all education materials to households, and in a series of radio ads. But behind all this was a pretty standard set of prescriptions about reducing, recycling, and composting. Enjoyment was to be found in doing the right thing, in self-discipline. Still, there is something unsettling and suggestive about the interdiction to enjoy. Is this the pleasure of control or of care and deliberation? Who can say? But at least enjoyment cultivates other responses and ways of being with waste beyond moral duty or disgust.

What this campaign does invoke is Italo Calvino's beautiful essay on putting out the garbage, La Poubelle Agreee, in which pleasure and enjoyment, not duty or disgust, are the central emotions. This essay is a series of reveries on rubbish rituals. In common with waste educators Calvino is concerned with practices, with our everyday behaviors around rubbish:

Here I am, then, on my way downstairs already, holding the bucket by its semi-circular handle, taking care it doesn't swing too much and spill its contents. The lid I usually leave behind in the kitchen: it's an irksome accessory, that lid, it never quite manages to combine its two tasks of concealing the rubbish and getting out of the way when you have to chuck more in. The compromise one

settles for involves keeping it at an angle, a bit like a mouth opening, trapping it between the bucket and the wall in precarious equilibrium. . . . That transfer from one container to another, which for most inhabitants of the metropolis takes on the significance of a passage from public to private, for me, in our house, in the garage where we keep the big poubelle during the day, is only the last gesture of the ceremonial upon which the private is founded.³⁷

But unlike most waste education Calvino's story considers these practices in terms of their phenomenological and sacred resonances. The pleasure he gets from putting out the garbage is not the pleasure of being virtuous, of being a "good sort," it is the pleasure of habit and order. The gesture of throwing away is the "first and indispensable condition of being," for one is what one does not throw away. In the purifying ritual of putting out the rubbish we not only confirm who we are, the boundaries of the self, we also create the conditions for renewal. For Calvino every act of rubbish disposal is a little funeral that postpones our own inevitable demise, it is an offering "made to the underworld, to the gods of death and loss."³⁸

What is so startling about Calvino's essay is the absence in it of guilt and resentment. He does not experience putting out the rubbish as coercion or moral duty, though he is aware of the municipal rules that structure his practices. For him, rubbish has other values and meanings; its disciplines, its rituals, awaken him to the pleasures of self-cultivation. Waste here is not something to be reduced, recycled, reused. He does not frame his relation to it through the discourses of environmental awareness. Rather, it is a fundamental component of the arts of existence, of the habits and sensibilities that give meaning and order to the self. It is an activity through which we are able to reflect on ways of being. Calvino's ethos of waste blurs the distinctions between thinking and feeling, putting out the garbage is both an intellectual and spiritual experience. Its effects reverberate through several registers of being. Through waste practices we sense the limits of the self and connect with wider forces. In enjoying waste, he is deriving pleasure from the careful management of loss and disposal.

In his reveries on rubbish, Calvino is open to the ways in which waste management alludes to other ways of being: the inevitability of death, the profound comfort of ritual, the sensuality and pleasure in maintaining order. Unlike the letter writer incensed about recycling Calvino has no anxiety about the bound-

aries between himself and his garbage. Instead of stinginess and irritation he expresses openness and generosity. Instead of a binary, a fixed opposition, he sees an active relation, a movement in which the identities of waste and the self are implicated in each other. This is an evocative account of relationality, of the liminal space in which separation meets connection. Calvino does not deny the necessity of disposal; putting out the garbage is a gesture of separation that prevents merger and contamination, but it is also, paradoxically, connection. It links him to wider experiences of loss and ritual. For separation is a relation, it is not the opposite of connection; to experience ourselves as separate from rubbish is still to be in a relation with it. This is the messiness and ambiguity that marks our relations with rubbish and exposes the fantasy of a pure and stable morality. And this is the messiness and ambiguity that makes ethical work experimental, creative, and relational.

These may seem weak, even pathetic, alternatives to the power and urgency of campaigns based on guilt and mastery. But much like the plastic bag scene in American Beauty they recognize a wider range of responses to rubbish than moralism ever does. They implicitly speak to our plurivocity of being; they acknowledge our dependence on waste, the ways in which we need it to maintain a bounded self; but they don't convert this dependence into resentment or fear. Connolly suggests that the most complex ethical issues arise in contexts in which intense suffering is implicated in securing the "self-confidence, wholeness, transcendence and cultural merit of others. That is, the most intense, intractable cases of suffering are political in character. They often revolve around . . . the politics of becoming."³⁹ There is no doubt that the environment, "nature," is suffering due to the burden of our excessive waste; that our sense of transcendence and mastery over nature emerges, in part, from our capacity to dump waste on it. As Michel Serres says, one of the ways in which we possess nature is by fouling it.⁴⁰ But in seeking to change this, politics driven by the logics of moral imperatives and guilt can go only so far. A politics of becoming proceeds from those responses to waste that unsettle mastery, those intensities that signal not our difference from waste but our profound implications with it.

A version of this chapter was published as "Plastic Bags: Living with Rubbish" in the International Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (2001).

Revisiting the history of shit will set the scene—but not just any history of shit. The language of modern government and family contributed to the transmutation of shit, implicating it in the reordering of bodies, space, and urban administration. The task, here, is to track these transmutations and their role in differentiating public and private. Triumphalist accounts of engineering and civic improvement are not much use. Their ideologies of progress tend to cloud the issue.⁵ While it is easy to reduce the history of sanitation to technological innovation and a few male visionaries, the effect is to write bodies and discourse out of the story. Yet the question is precisely the links between bodies, infrastructure, and social regulation.

The sewer may be a great technological achievement, but it is also what literally connects shit as public problem and shit as private secret. Sewers link us to the state without any sense of direct intervention. They are where citizenship and subjectivity intermingle. Their technical and hygienic effects cannot be isolated from their ethical and social ones. Flushing and washing your hands, rituals of cleaning and self-care, as naturalized as they seem, are a product of very particular forms of reason; habitus has a history. Rather than being the bottom line of the body's biological identity, shit, like sex, has been subject to shifting mentalities. This means that the biological reality of shit is less the object than our relationships with it: how practices of personal waste management are caught up in larger political assemblages and become implicated in the constitution of the self.

Foucault described this process whereby modern forms of rule work on the body as biopower.⁶ He argued that biopower makes “life” into a political object, and that its effects operate through the creation of biological norms. The paradoxical issue with shit is whether it was seen as part of life or whether it was connected to death and decay. In the histories I review here the status of human waste is ambiguous. It is both something that needs to be managed efficiently in order to secure the integrity of natural phenomenon in populations; and something to be hidden away and rendered secret because of its connection to death—which, Foucault notes, is power’s limit, the moment that evades it.

According to Foucault, biopower emerged as the dominant mechanism of state power in the nineteenth century. This was when the normalizing imperatives of various biopolitical technologies—from statistics on birth rates to sewers—reached into the vital fundamentals of human existence, shaping bodies in relation to biological norms. Biopower operates directly on bodies; it works not through the meditation of consciousness or through repressive force, but by implicating individuals in relations of identification and differentiation from norms.⁷ The challenge in thinking about the history of shit, then, is to understand its biopolitical effects; to track how various changes in the way it was administered created new normalizing imperatives about its intimate management and its role in public order.

“Surely, the State is the Sewer”—this is how Dominique Laporte begins chapter 3 of his brilliantly scatological History of Shit.⁸ It’s an important claim and one that is endorsed by two other valuable accounts of the place of waste in modern social administration. Both Mary Poovey, in Making a Social Body, and Thomas Osborne, in his essay “Security and Vitality: Drains, Liberalism and Power in the Nineteenth Century,” make the same point, albeit without the literary flourishes.⁹ Reading these texts together is productive. All are attentive to how bodies became the literal sites for modern biopolitical norms, and all are concerned to track the shifting forces (discursive, economic, political) that made shit thinkable as a public problem and unthinkable as a private secret.

Poovey, Laporte, and Osborne examine the processes whereby shit became a political object and show how this constituted new norms for privacy and domesticity. In different ways they all echo Warner’s key point that “privacy is publicly constructed.”¹⁰ But how did the state become the sewer? How did

shit, or the “sanitary idea,” become a major impetus for state formation? How did the problem of biological waste energize the state and help it consolidate its apparatuses and techniques?

Laporte’s approach to these questions is unashamedly Lacanian.¹¹ He equates the state with the Law but this totalizing impulse is tempered by a historical method that is evocatively Foucauldian. He defines the relation between shit and power in terms of exclusion and repression. However, he is aware of the fact that repression is part of the same historical network as the thing it denounces. In this way History of Shit resonates with The History of Sexuality in that both describe the frenzy to put into discourse what is sentenced to disappear or classified as secret. For Laporte, Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis is equally applicable to shit. Rather than power imposing taboos of nonexistence and silence, it produces, brings into being, knowledges and technologies whose effect is not the prohibition but the organization of secrets. “We dare not speak about shit. But . . . no other subject—even sex—has caused us to speak so much.”¹²

Laporte begins his history with two sixteenth-century edicts. One was to clean up official language and enforce the compulsory use of maternal French; the other was to clean up the streets—to forbid the tossing of refuse out of windows because it was impeding the movements of trade. The policing of speech and an emergent politics of waste were linked by law and commerce. So Laporte establishes a relationship between purity, political authority, and capitalism. But this is no standard Marxist account of the rise of the state driven by the growing demands of capital accumulation. It is more an account of how the state acquires divine or celestial capacities, how it comes to be understood as inviolable and therefore capable of purifying the most repulsive things.¹³ The constitution of money as dirty and corrupting was fundamental to the rise of the market economy. Separating unclean financial transactions from the realm of the state and relegating them to the private paralleled the privatization of waste; the demand that shit be removed from public gaze and dealt with in households:

Thus, as a “private” thing—each subject’s business, each proprietor’s responsibility—shit becomes a political object through its constitution as the dialectical other of the “public.” From the sixteenth century on, the State initiates a contradictory discourse on waste that is nonetheless consistent with its

definition of state capitalism: a discourse that urges proprietors to become even richer, while casting a withering eye on the foul odor of their accumulations.¹⁴

For Laporte it was commerce and shit that helped found the early modern state. This is not to deny the significance of language and territory but to make a case for the state as a purifying force that establishes its power through its capacity to remove filthy things to the category of the private. Shit had to be excluded from the official in order to establish the state's power to cleanse. But this exclusion did not involve the construction of sewers, the creation of an infrastructure for the subterranean management of threats to life. The focus of these sixteenth-century edicts was not the biological needs of individuals. The health of that abstract category "the population" was not the objective. This management of shit reveals sovereign rather than biopower. The forced privatization of excrement was a way of expressing state power. Shit became a political object through the process of making it an individual or private responsibility, making its producers legal proprietors. Property and propriety become linked through the politics of shit.

Poovey's focus is the formation of distinctly modern domains of thought and action in mid-nineteenth-century England. She deploys a method described as "historical epistemology" that allows her to analyze transformations in epistemological fields.¹⁵ Her aim is to see how certain knowledges and protocols became institutionalized, codifying new sets of norms, practices, and boundaries with widespread material effects. As in the History of Shit Foucault is present in this text, for transformations in ways of knowing are all about the order of discourse. However, Poovey's state is not the center or singular cause of these transformations, as Laporte argues, but one element in a dense network of technologies, theories, policies, and political disputes that are all implicated in the constitution of new norms and domains of social regulation. Poovey is describing biopower at work.

In her reading of Edwin Chadwick's 1842 Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, Poovey shows how, in making sanitation a political issue, domestic norms and personal habits were targeted. In other words, Chadwick's version of "public health" and sanitary reform begins in the working-class home. What Poovey shows in her close reading of this report is that the justification for establishing sanitary conditions in the homes of the poor was primarily moral, despite all the concern about disease

and public health. In building a case for the need for sanitation the report problematizes the living habits of the poor. Not only were their household practices suspect due to overcrowding, filth, and debauchery, but also the realm of public space in poor areas was suspect, particularly the street. This was a zone of unimaginable pandemonium where all kinds of boundaries and taboos were violated.¹⁶ This was where dangerous, morally suspect populations lurked: bone pickers, vagrants, and the itinerant poor—groups without homes and often living in and off waste.

Chadwick's vision for reform involved a centralized authority, staffed by bureaucratic experts and based on networks of sewerage and drainage systems that would regulate waste along the principles of economic circulation and exchange. His objective, according to Poovey, was a reformed working-class domesticity based on middle-class habits—these were the normative standard that all should aspire to. And the sewer would provide the conditions necessary for such changes in personal behavior and family life. By translating the problem of the working class into the condition of the environment Chadwick justified centralized and preventative measures for the management of shit. But these depended on a logic of individualization and domestication that located the primary identity of the working-class man firmly within the family rather than in class-based associations. Working-class women's capacity to manage the home, and men, was limited by their appalling living conditions; reforming these was where public health coincided with a form of disciplinary individualism in the realm of personal habits.

Osborne is similarly concerned with nineteenth-century public health and its political rationality. Like Poovey he uses Chadwick's sewer vision to develop an argument about normalization. But his analysis focuses on how accounts of the technological achievement of the sewer linked body, city, and governance together. Sewers, drains, privies, and the water supply were conceptualized as "organic," in that they coupled themselves directly and literally to the vital economy of the body.¹⁷ Sanitary engineering allowed for the removal of waste in the name of a purified city, a city purged of all the nuisances that restricted its vital order. It also facilitated a form of indirect government, for drains and flowing water into homes impacted on conduct without any sense of coercion or direct control. Their normalizing impact was not negative or despotic but productive. By linking the standardization of the environment to the vital capacities of the body government established

a normative relation. This relation involved the constitution of a distinctively Victorian "vital conscience": the "realisation that the establishment of biological normativity—the ability of the living being to levy norms on the environment—should be one of the aims of political rule."¹⁸ A discourse of naturalization underpinned this. Sanitation had to follow the natural laws of the vital domain, it also naturalized the domestic as a space free from government. The essentially liberal character of this management of shit could be sustained only if natural processes were left to themselves. In this way, sanitation culturally organized the limits and meanings of the "natural." The function of regulation and infrastructure was the government of all those nuisances that posed threats to the security and maintenance of the vital sphere: that field beyond the merely medical that impacted on the wider well-being of the population.

Despite differences in analytic technique and theories of rule, these histories of shit resonate with one another. They allude to the vast and heterogeneous mass of discourses, institutions, social practices, and political processes that have targeted shit from the early modern period on. Human waste may be a universal, but its meanings, its management, and its semiotic and material relations to the body change. It is impossible to think about this sort of waste separate from the forms of knowledge and power that map it into and out of the body; that make defecation a technique of the self. The modern problematization of shit activated a range of different state strategies from edicts to expert inquiries. What links these is the desire to eliminate olfactory and visual contact with this form of waste in order to establish "purity" and "cleanliness" as normative imperatives.

There were, however, significant differences in the sites where waste reform was targeted. Laporte's account shows that in sixteenth-century France the street was the initial space identified as in need of purification. The state forced households to accept responsibility for their waste by outlawing the public disposal of shit on streets. "Public" here was primarily equated with all space beyond the house. This doesn't mean that bodily waste disappeared from streets overnight or that animal manure and other wastes didn't remain an ongoing problem for centuries—it's never been that easy to stop people from using the street as a waste-processing arena. Rather, it means that one of the state's founding conditions was to apply the categories "public" and "private" to shit.

The demand for privies and cesspools within houses inaugurated the individuation and privatization of waste, but it was not until the nineteenth century that waste reformers began to worry about how households actually lived with shit. Concern for waste as a public problem was still everywhere evident. Industrial pollution, bad drainage, street garbage, and contaminated water were serious issues in relation to the state of industrializing urban environments, and they were the impetus for major regulatory reforms and infrastructure development. This frenzy of public intervention is significant not simply because of its environmental effects but because of its implications for intimacy. Chadwick's focus on domestic life and his concern to make sure that sanitation had moral—not just hygienic—effects reveals that privacy and its normative dimensions had now become central to the political rationality of biological waste management. It was presumed that leaving families alone with running water and drains made possible all sorts of "good" practices.

What these three histories of shit reveal are the complex transactions between public and private that waste initiated. And while they are useful for understanding how the constitution of modern forms of social administration came to terms with excrement they don't tell us much about how these transactions acquired a visceral intensity. There is a silence about the literal body in both Poovey and Osborne that reduces it to an effect of discourse. Abstracted social bodies or the collective body are their focus, but this makes their accounts of domestic space strangely depopulated. Only Laporte is concerned with how differentiating public and private shit generated new relations to body and self and new affects.

Shifting relations to shit, now that it was kept much closer to home, impacted on subjectivity. Privatization meant domestication, it meant changes to urban architecture and to senses of intimacy and individuality. It meant a new regime of smell in the space of the home. Laporte argues that these practical transformations in relations with shit were fundamental to the organization of the modern subject.¹⁹ While excremental matters were clearly subject to a public-private split in ancient Rome (quite apart from the legendary cloaca maxima), Laporte argues that the rituals surrounding excreting in this period did not have the same impact on subjectivity because of the different role of knowledge and power. When the monarchic French state declared to each his shit it linked the construction of the privy to a range of other discourses on privacy, particularly the economic. The private realm was demarcated as the

site of material and waste accumulation. This is when “doing your business” began to acquire symbolic resonances, when both shit and money became inextricably connected to the individual.²⁰

Making households retain their shit on-site, making producers masters of their own waste, led to significant transformations in definitions of the intolerable and the economy of the senses. Keeping waste within the space of the family meant that “the apprenticeship of the sense of smell directed all its efforts against the stercus.”²¹ Laporte shows how shit became the negative referent for the individualized and purified body, and he implicates the state in the same logic, arguing that what the bourgeois subject and the state shared was an inextricable connection to the fate of waste. Their prestige and value depended on establishing distance from the basest of human products.

Literal and metaphoric separation from the base is one of the defining markers of modernity’s classificatory regimes. But exactly how have our relations with shit and self been transformed by the modern technologies and infrastructure that remove biological waste fast and efficiently? What have sanitation and flushing toilets done to everyday habits, senses of intimacy, and measures of disgust? How has the gradual establishment of the bathroom as a norm of Western domestic architecture impacted on bodies and sensibility? Surely the realization of the contemporary self as a privatized purified body starts in the bathroom, where we confront our particularity as a waste-making organism?

In taking a detour to the bathroom the aim here is not architectural or social history but a closer investigation of how this private space of elimination orders our relations to both self and public spheres. If privacy is publicly constituted, as the histories surveyed above show, what is the significance of bathrooms? How is this private space for waste management implicated in the distinction between public and private shit? What sort of micropractices does the bathroom foster, and how do these shape orientations to our bodily waste? Obviously a whole “other” public culture makes the bathroom possible, a culture of engineering and plumbing, massive infrastructural plants and sewerage treatment works. While we are literally connected to this via drains, the state never seems present when we shut the door. This is a result of techniques of invisibility, a technological and aesthetic commitment to disappearance.

These techniques of separation and invisibility have ethical and political effects. The public culture that underpins the bathroom enables the making of a private self. Infrastructure is fundamental to the development of certain conducts and ethical techniques of the self, to the formation of distinctions between clean and dirty, pleasurable and shameful. Rituals of waste management and self-care are now deeply dependent on our attachment to the concrete space of the bathroom, that private realm within the domestic where we are intimate with ourselves.

The normalization of the bathroom as a distinct space for eliminating waste has had dramatic impacts on demarcating the most disgusting and the most private. Plumbing has altered the disciplines of bodies, the ways we manage and map them, and how we experience them as clean. It has been at the heart of shifting discourses of cleanliness and definitions of personal purity. It has also been fundamental to distancing us from any direct role in managing our own waste. While the rich may have always been able to outsource management of their shit, the poor had to deal with their own portable containers. Mass plumbing made distance and separation from your own waste widely accessible. While this is hailed as a triumph of public health and disease management, which it certainly is, the impacts of public waste infrastructure on senses of intimacy and ethical identity are equally significant. Streamlined technologies of elimination make encounters with shit even more charged. If disgust is predicated on “proximity, sight and the closeness of smell and touch, the overwhelming horror that the disgusting object will engulf us,” as Elspeth Probyn argues, then much is invested in the efficiency of infrastructure to protect us from the disgusting.²² The technocratic demand for these services to remove our waste is infused with another, far more visceral, demand: protect the user from any contact, from a proximity to their own waste, that might disturb them. When systems fail and shit gushes up from down below our first response is not to blame the drain or curse the state authority but to protect ourselves from the overwhelming effect, from the horror of contamination.

The logic of bathroom design since the early twentieth century has been “streamlining,” an ideology borrowed from manufacturing and privileging efficient and accelerated movement of products through the production cycle.²³ Lupton and Millers’ account of streamlining locates it in an emerging modernist concern with waste and the twin obsessions of bodily consumption and economic consumption: “Streamlining performed a surreal conflation of the

organic and the mechanical: its seamless skins are fluidly curved yet rigidly impervious to dirt and moisture. The molded forms of streamlining yielded an excretory aesthetic, a material celebration of natural and cultural digestive cycles.²⁴ In linking the growth of the privatized domestic sphere to the growth of consumption Lupton and Miller show how industry provided a range of powerful metaphors for the organization of the home. The kitchen was a miniature factory, and the bathroom the place where the body's biological production was maintained. Human digestion, based on the consumption of food and the expulsion of waste, was an intimate economy in need of technologies to facilitate efficient processes of elimination.

Since the normalization of the bathroom its specific technologies have continually sought to integrate economic, aesthetic, and hygienic goals. They have also linked the body to a range of new fixtures and norms of purification. What is significant about these norms is that the standards for personal hygiene, while they may have emerged out of scientifically based public health reforms, have come to far exceed the demands of utility and the functional need for clean bodies. The parallels with housework are strong. As many feminist accounts of the history of labor-saving devices show, domestic technology actually increased the amount of work women did in the home because it was accompanied by rapidly increasing standards of cleanliness.²⁵

So too with the bathroom, which is deeply implicated in raising measures of personal cleanliness. Cleaning the self may be easier, but it's done more often and with more anxiety. The motives for this go way beyond the utility of dodging germs; they are caught up in the formation of sensibility, the complex interconnections between sensuousness, ethical telos, and pleasure. If sensibility is a cultivated form of sensuousness, an aesthetic of the self, it is also about the norms and classifications that make these practices meaningful. Making ourselves clean is ethical work; we are transforming the body in relation to a wider moral ethos. We are making a private self that is enmeshed with all the normative measures of privacy and purity swarming around the bathroom. In other words, most of us are far cleaner than we need to be, and most of us have an irrational fear of diseases and contamination. Our rituals of self-purification are linked more to ethical and visceral anxiety than to real biological danger.

Disgust with our own waste, fear of encountering it, cannot be sourced simply to the rise of the bathroom. The modern hygienic imagination and

economy of the senses has complex and diverse origins, as we saw in the previous section. But there is no question that the private bathroom has helped organize those fears. Two issues emerge from this: first, the central role of the bathroom in giving the public-private distinction a visceral register. As I've argued, bathrooms established a marked distance from our own waste and inscribed on bodies new classificatory regimes. When these classifications and distinctions are threatened the disgust we experience may seem deeply primal, but it is also social, inextricably caught up in the technological achievement of the bathroom. As a private space this room organizes our most intimate encounters with our own bodies and in the same moment intensifies the force of the affective energies attached to bodily waste.

Second, public infrastructure is implicated in exaggerated senses of personal purity. Bathroom technologies and techniques minimize encounters with shit. They facilitate the myth of absolute separation from waste, on which mastery of the clean self and its borders now increasingly depends. These technologies provide us with gallons of water, an increasingly scarce public resource, to maintain sensibilities and habits that are fundamental to the organization of our prepublic intimate self. While we may pay for access to this resource, and while we may be positioned as consumers in relation to public utilities, we still demand the right to consume as much as we desire because this service is seen as fundamental to our most "natural" self, the clean body.

The paradox is that the very technologies for eradicating shit also, at the same time, affirm and objectify it. Consider the example of a television advertisement for a toilet cleaner. A group of housewives cluster around a toilet listening to a white-coated expert extol the virtues of a new toilet cleaner that requires no additional brushing or scrubbing. "You mean we don't have to touch it?" the women say in unison over and over. The expert repeats his mantra, they repeat their incredulous response. This ad doesn't just capture horror with the toilet; it also captures the visceral registers of disgust. The possibility of contaminating touch demands a streamlined system of waste management and cleaning practices that make no physical or ethical demands on the waste-making body. Without this chemical protection the boundaries of the private self are dangerously vulnerable.

While this ad, like many others in the same genre, upholds the fantasy that the purified private self must be protected from its waste, other examples represent the bathroom as a space of luxury consumption and desire centered

around an endless availability of pure water. In 2003 Sydney introduced water restrictions, and several local governments implemented regulations demanding mandatory dual-flush toilets in all new developments. The outcry from certain outraged constituents was furious. How could the state control how much water consumers could use to eliminate their waste? Surely this was an infringement of basic consumer rights, especially when these water-saving toilets were occasionally inefficient, producing confrontations that consumers didn't want to have? Using gallons and gallons of clean water to eliminate their waste protected them from this possibility. Why should they be denied access to water when, as they claimed: "We're paying for it!"

Here is the private subject in the bathroom accusing the state of restricting his or her freedom as a consumer and putting his or her most intimate sense of self at risk. The rhetoric of ecological responsibility, of scarce public resources and the need for restraint, is refused. For this is the rhetoric of citizenship and civic values, of collective identification with the notion of public good and the environment. To be a consumer is to be able to realize individual and private desires not just in the mall but also in the bathroom. It is to see the purchase of goods and services as integral to the making and maintenance of personal identity. Whether these goods and services come from the state or multinational corporations is not as crucial as the fact that they are purchased. Buying things makes us members of a market, makes us expect choice, makes us demand our right to have our needs satisfied. If certain practices of waste management are fundamental to senses of purity and identity then individuals must be free to consume all that it takes to sustain these. In this example the heavily subsidized state provision of public waste infrastructure rubs up against restrictions on domestic water use and the demand that consumers restrain themselves in the interest of the environment. Water users are a public and consumers at the same time, and the tensions between these two subjectivities underpin these protests.

Advertisements for toilet cleaners and protests about dual-flushing toilets are two moments in which we can see the complex interconnections between self, state, and market. While the normalization of the bathroom has been fundamental to modern experiences of privacy and a prepublic purified self, it has also distanced us from waste in the name of public health and infrastructural efficiency. While these technocratic achievements cannot be underestimated, they also need to be understood in terms of their impacts on

subjectivity and the experience of the public-private distinction. Despite sanitation's massively networked connections from public waste facilities to private homes it is not experienced as state intervention. It is just the hidden linchpin of our most intimate rituals of self-care. Water flows in, shit flows out, where from and where to we hardly care. The thing is that the flows are maintained, that our bathroom works to protect us from encountering our waste, so that certain ethical and aesthetic sensibilities that are fundamental to the making of the purified private self will be not be threatened.

How then is the bathroom and the streamlined elimination of shit implicated in a wider politics of waste? As I've argued, bathrooms help produce our most intimate sense of self, but this intimacy depends on a diverse network of technologies and public resources. When access to these is restricted and consumers protest, the political object at stake is privacy and a purified self. In moving now to two very different examples of political activism around human waste I aim to examine what is at stake in protests whose focus is shit in public. How do these protests configure the place of waste in the public-private distinction? Does the formation of activist publics around shit necessarily involve indifference to the particularity of ourselves, as Warner argues? Do intimate waste practices get ignored or mobilized? Two great moments in the politics of shit open up these questions—Sydney's famous POGO Parades in the late 1980s and the ongoing toilet festivals of Mumbai.²⁶

In January 1989 Sydney's leading newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, began running a series of investigative reports on the state of Sydney's beaches.²⁷ These highlighted extensive water pollution, evident not only in the filth washed up onshore but also in reports of sick fish and sick swimmers. The primary target was the Water Board, the government agency involved in managing Sydney's water supply and human waste. Ocean outfalls and their failings were identified as the source of widespread ocean pollution. And no wonder; since white settlement all drains built in Sydney have pointed seaward. The first sewers, built in the 1850s, drained raw sewage into the harbor, and this use of natural water as a waste treatment facility has remained largely unchanged since. For government waste management organizations the value of the ocean is not its recreational or real estate possibilities but its seemingly unlimited potential as a site of elimination.

The 1989 exposé led by the media accused the Water Board of covering up the facts of serious ocean contamination and misleading the public. Surfline, the Water Board's daily report on the state of the beaches, was exposed as based on nothing more than visual observation. Scientific analysis of water samples revealed a very different story—high levels of faecal coliform, viruses, and highly toxic industrial waste. Outraged reaction spread, the Surf Lifesaving Association threatened to remove its volunteers from beach patrol, fish sales plummeted, swimmers deserted the beach, and doctors reported increased levels of illness among people who had recently surfed. Meanwhile, the media kept up the pressure, branding the whole issue "Watergate."

In this context the Water Board struggled to retain public credibility. Since the late 1970s it had been planning to build extended ocean outfalls in order to manage increased pressure on the sewerage system and increased pollution. Vigorous debate had surrounded this proposal, much of it devoted to disputes over the environmental effects of outfalls and the interpretation of scientific studies. Public calls for alternative and more environmentally friendly strategies for dealing with shit were met with claims that they were too expensive. The Water Board argued that ocean outfalls were the cheapest solution for dealing with a city's shit; more environmentally sustainable options would cost residents far more and generate significant resistance. The Water Board mobilized scientific "evidence" to show that extended deepwater outfalls were environmentally fine and that effluent would behave just as predicted and that no other treatment was necessary.

But a group of skeptical environmental and community groups refused to buy this; effluent wasn't that obedient, especially when there was no secondary treatment. The Board's refusal to consider this objection in planning the outfalls meant that the ocean was, once again, regarded as a dumping ground; the Board's bureaucrats argued that currents, dilution, and dispersal were adequate alternatives to comprehensive treatment before discharge. Other lobby groups raised the issue of industrial waste, the illegal and toxic substances coursing through drains: What would extended outfalls do about this? Stop the Ocean Pollution (STOP) and People Opposed to Ocean Outfalls (POOO), two small activist groups, campaigned as effectively as they could during the 1980s struggling to get their position in the media, but the Water Board had a massive public relations unit and a very cozy relationship with the press—until 1989, that is.

The debate about ocean outfalls and contaminated waters took off when the press finally challenged the Water Board about its technocratic ethos and lack of accountability. But this challenge escalated into a mass campaign only because the activist groups already established, STOP and POOO, grabbed the opportunity to mobilize public anger about state lies and state pollution. In late 1988 POOO organized a little-publicized rally at Manly beach that attracted five thousand people on a rainy day. In March 1989 another event was planned. Called "Turn Back the Tide," it was envisaged as a rock concert on Bondi beach, with a crowd of 50,000 the optimistic expectation; 240,000 people showed up.

The phenomenal success of the "Turn Back the Tide" concert surprised organizers, government, media, and, most of all, the Water Board. It was no longer possible to claim that the issue was a media attack; a mass rally of nearly a quarter of a million people signaled a real groundswell of support. It signaled a public formed by an ongoing media debate, emerging at an event as a mass assembly, linked not just by visibility and common action but also by a common anxiety.

What kind of public was produced at the "Turn Back the Tide" concert, and how did it work? Only by answering these questions is it possible to reflect on exactly how shit became a political object in this campaign and whether a different future for shit was imagined. Warner's account of the dynamics of publics and counterpublics is invaluable here. He meticulously outlines the discursive and political operations of a public as distinct from the public. His aim is to understand how publics are historically formed, their crucial place in the modern social landscape, and their role in constructing social worlds. The mass of bodies that gathered on Bondi beach was a public organized, brought into being, by discourse. Press reports, television news, and radio talk shows created a public merely through the fact that people all over Sydney gave the various discourses on ocean pollution some attention. No matter how minimal, listening, reflecting, or glancing at the headlines are all ways of participating in a public and accepting being addressed by its terms.²⁸

The "Turn Back the Tide" concert reflects another of Warner's premises: stranger sociability. If a public is a relation among strangers, then the bodies gathered at Bondi performed their public belonging not by sharing a common identity but by accepting and inhabiting the rhetoric of public address. Participants' private concerns about oceans contaminated with shit were experienced

as resonating with complete strangers. In this way the discourses circulating were ambiguously personal and impersonal. Warner says of public speech that "we might recognize ourselves as addressees but it is equally important that we remember that the speech was addressed to indefinite others."²⁹ This performative dimension of publics, this sense of their membership being active, free, voluntary, and noninstitutionalized, set the "Turn Back the Tide" event apart from the wider social movement of environmentalism. While pollution was a central point of discursive mobilization, and while various environmental and activist groups were involved in mounting the campaign, the public formed could not be described as sharing a common history or political ideology. Those who turned up at Bondi beach could not be described as a "rent-a-crowd" or the usual suspects of "mad greenies." As a public they didn't preexist, they were called into being by a vision of a contaminated world.

Warner also argues that processes of public formation do not involve persuasion, as this presumes that a public already exists, waiting to be convinced by rational discussion—and that individuals in that public will all have the same reading of available discourses. The problem with the assumption of preexisting publics is that it excludes the poetic or textual qualities of discourse. Sense and reason are privileged rather than the play of meaning, emotion, and the expressive possibilities of public speech.

As one of the founders of POGO said, when interviewed about why he set up the organization: "Dumping shit and everything else in the ocean just seems wrong, I don't want to surf in shit."³⁰ Not a lot of poetry here but definitely a sense of disgust and moral unease. There is no question that the discourses surrounding "Turn Back the Tide" and the POGO Parades were often driven by an affective horror or mass disgust. This affective register gave expression to a counterdiscourse about shit in public that challenged the Water Board's notions of technocratic efficiency and scientific evidence. And this was the source of their force. The rash of cartoons depicting people diving into toilet bowls, or lifeguards hauling a roll of toilet paper into the surf instead of a rescue rope, were evidence of how an alternative discourse about sewers began circulating. This discourse created a different image of the issue by making explicit the link between bathrooms and the beach. By exposing the literal connection between private waste practices and public space, the "Turn Back the Tide" public produced another set of understandings of the outfall crisis. Their vision of a poisoned world, of the ocean as a waste dump, didn't

just speak to a deep anxiety about boundaries collapsing, to a sense of mourning for the archaic value of the ocean, it also gave voice to an array of alternative strategies for managing shit.

As the issue grew the press began publishing different ideas for dealing with Sydney's shit. All kinds of weird and wonderful ecological approaches surfaced. These included giant sewerage farms out west converting shit into agricultural fertilizer, decentralized waste treatment works, and the creation of artificial wetlands in the midst of urban sprawl. All of these alternatives mobilized popular expertise. They involved creative, imaginative solutions driven not simply by the technical problem of managing a large city's shit but also by an ethical imperative to do this sustainably and in ways that did not involve the exploitation of the ocean. The Water Board's domination of the issue, its desire to reduce it to an engineering problem, was contested by a counterdiscourse that circulated widely and that radically expanded the terms of the public debate. This counterdiscourse often included the expression of a range of emotions, from anger to disgust to grief to hilarity; it acknowledged the visceral dangers implicit in all waste management. The credibility given to alternative ecological worldviews (usually dismissed as the work of cranks) and the linking of the most private and intimate waste practice, defecating, to public space and the public sphere—both were part of an emergent counterpublic. And the effect of this counterpublic was to problematize shit and its public management, to establish a different and progressive ethico-political framing of the issue.

But it didn't last long—this fleeting counterpublic was soon coopted by the disciplines of political negotiation, and the terms of its discourse were gradually reduced to a technocratic agenda set by the state. The list of demands POGO put to government and the Water Board after the "Turn Back the Tide" concert included removing all toxic waste from sewers, halting all future ocean outfall construction, and classifying oceans under the Clean Waters Act. There was nothing on the list about initiating some of the alternative strategies for ecologically sustainable management of shit that had been proposed and nothing about changing what went on in bathrooms. The ocean was constituted as in need of protection, the public authority was constituted as in need of reform and accountability, but private waste practices went unchallenged. Despite the scatological vision of beaches and bathrooms being intimately connected (swimming in shit, surfing in toilets); despite the recognition of the toilet and drain as technologies not for managing waste but for dumping it;

despite all these transgressive representations of shit in public that the POOO parades and other events conjured up, intimate waste practices and their excessive use of resources were not regarded as part of a reform strategy. The politics of the possible overruled a vision of other ways of living with waste. Those present at the "Turn Back the Tide" concert were ultimately unable to confront the particularities of themselves. Their privacy was deemed outside the scope of the public campaign.

The Toilet Festivals of Mumbai and other Indian cities are a very different example of the politics of shit. Described by Appadurai as an example of deep democracy, they too involve a spirit of transgression and bawdy modes of public address, but their political aim is quite different.³¹ Initiated by the Alliance, a group of activist organizations working on urban poverty in Mumbai, the Toilet Festivals involve the exhibition and inauguration of working public toilets designed by and for the urban poor and often timed to coincide with visits from various state and aid officials.³² Appadurai's analysis of these festivals begins with an account of the humiliation of shitting in public, an inevitable and shaming reality for millions of Indians living in urban slums without sanitation. Quite apart from the public health risks of shitting without good sewerage systems and running water, this reality involves the most fundamental lack of privacy. As Appadurai argues, the risks of shitting in full public view are not just biological, they're symbolic. The inability to establish distance from their own waste denies slum dwellers the most basic sense of dignity and status. Shit confirms their victimization and poverty.

Contesting this means managing shit in a way that reduces health risks and confers dignity—hence, do-it-yourself sanitation. By designing their own toilets, building them, and using them, slum dwellers link technical innovation to a democratic practice focused on establishing the minimal conditions for privacy and a sense of intimate selfhood. In this change in the technical management of waste, "the condition of poverty moves from abjection to subjectivation."³³ The political object at stake here is not simply public health and basic waste management, it is also privacy. And what gives these festivals such force, according to Appadurai, is the fact that access to privacy also inaugurates a visible citizenship, it makes entry into the public sphere possible.

Can these two cases of the politics of shit illuminate each other, despite massive political and economic differences, despite vast variation in the place of shit in measures of a good life in Mumbai and Bondi? The Toilet Festivals

confirm Laporte's insistence that shit is crucial to the making of modern subjectivity; that shit is at the heart of public and private distinctions and the formation of a purified, private self. Although it was never acknowledged, the Bondi POOO protesters were defending their privacy. They were defending the necessity of a clear, unambiguous separation from their shit in the name of stable moral frameworks: clean-dirty, self-waste. Swimming in shit undoes this classificatory regime and the security of the self that depends on it. In making ocean outfalls the focus of political action, the POOO protesters were taking private waste rituals as given, as beyond question. The demand for uncontaminated oceans targeted the state as a polluter but not the self. The technology of streamlined elimination that the sewer represents means that the minute bodily waste disappears the self is no longer implicated or responsible for its management—until it returns and becomes impossible to ignore.

Sewers transform shit to effluent, from private waste to public problem. Streamlined removal facilitates literal and moral distance from our bodily waste, and most of the time this distance contributes to an ethical blindness about its management. Although the carnivalesque atmosphere of the POOO parades made much of shit's role in disturbing the private-public distinction, the vision for reform was unable to sustain this disturbance and use it as a force for new practices. Ultimately, public waste management was the problem, not rituals of privacy.

In the toilet festivals the demand for minimal public waste infrastructure is fundamentally linked to the right to privacy. Shitting in public, living their lives in perpetual visibility, Appadurai argues, actually renders slum dwellers invisible to the state. In claiming the right to privacy, slum dwellers participate in a politics of recognition. To have privacy is to exist in the eyes of the state, and this is the starting point for making claims for basic public services. Privacy is the political object at stake in these campaigns. It is defined as the ability to establish distance from one's shit, to be separate from its contaminating influence. And this minimal privacy is seen as publicly constituted. The capacity to make a private self, to manage one's waste in a way that produces subjectivity rather than shame, to bracket off certain intimate practices from the gaze of others, is a fundamental process of distinction that anyone living with a bathroom takes as given. It inaugurates a public personhood. The radical claim of the toilet festivals, to make waste a private matter, is inseparable

from the demand for basic public provision. Or, to put this another way, in the toilet festivals the personal is political.

For the Pooo public the personal was not political. The conditions for privacy and separation from shit that the state provided were not challenged. Rather, it was what the state did with shit once it assumed responsibility for it that was under attack. And so the outfalls were built, further offshore and deeper but still pouring thousands of gallons of effluent into the ocean every day. The fleeting counterpublic formed by the horror of shit along shorelines, grease in the breakers, viruses in the sand, dissipated once the Water Board was called into account and agreed to certain modifications to its technocratic vision. Privacy was not called into account. Sydneysiders' inability or refusal to imagine a different way of living with their waste meant the their senses of purity and decorum were never at risk. Public infrastructure would still be there to protect them from themselves.

Bondi and Mumbai are a long way apart and in many senses difficult to compare. But the differences between them are suggestive. When the "lurn Back the Tide" counterpublic imagined a world in which oceans were not exploited as waste treatment facilities, the possibilities of an ecological citizenship were glimpsed. Here was a public disgusted by environmental disintegration, willing to contest state authority and advocate for oceans. The only problem was this vision did not extend to their intimate practices of waste management; any critical reflection on their personal ethics of waste was excluded. The right to privacy, to all the resource-hungry waste habits that sustain a private personhood, was separated from their public performance as concerned and disgusted citizens. In the Mumbai slums privation and powerlessness are the norm, not neoliberal notions of privacy. Human waste is one marker of this. Getting it effectively managed to reduce disease shows how do-it-yourself governmentality inaugurates a self able to be minimally recognized by the state. By refusing to shit in public, members of the Mumbai Alliance use waste to create a private personhood and with it a nascent citizenship: different habits, different ways in which waste is implicated in the distinctions between a public and private self.

A version of this essay was published as "Shit in Public" in Australian Humanities Review, April 2004, at www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-April-2004/hawkins.html.

Objects die. And while I'm interested in their afterlife, the causes of death matter. When people classify something as waste they are deciding that they no longer want to be connected to it. Sometimes this is a big decision and sometimes it's not. The plastic cup chucked in the bin walking out of the football stadium is a relief to be rid of. The short life of the disposable object is over—easy come, easy go. The favorite chair handed down from grandparents and now unstable and beyond repair is hard to throw out. It's useless but still connected to the self via circuits of memory and affect. The conversion of objects into waste is complex and complicated. There is a multiplicity of pathways to the limit point at which all function and value are exhausted.

While all cultures need distinctions between valued and valueless, there are multiple and diverse subclassifications within both these categories. Some

objects are valueless but we still hang on to them. They are no longer used but their lingering presence in the garage doesn't threaten us. These things aren't unsettling because they are out of sight, occupying a residual status in the microclassifications of rubbish. Then there are the valueless things that we encounter all the time: the dumpster behind the supermarket full of boxes of overripe pears, the perfectly functional but tattered sofa on the pavement; things classified as waste because they are wrecked, in excess of demand, or no longer desired, but still visible in our everyday movements through urban space. Other things are negatively valued; they threaten the stability of self, and we do all we can to eliminate them and render them invisible. As the previous chapter argues, negatively valued waste like shit challenges boundaries and symbolic order, hence its potential to be extremely disturbing. In this chapter it's the valueless rather than the negatively valued, the discarded but still visible waste and rubbish, that is the focus.

Recent writing on material culture has begun to focus on the conversion processes from valued to valueless. While transformations in uses, significations, and values have always been a central concern in this field, the transformations involved in the production of waste and rubbish have been somewhat overlooked. Gavin Lucas, like Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe, notes the relative lack of interest in waste within studies of material culture.¹² While theorists have been happy to see waste as a historically changing category or as a source of archaeological insight, they have been less interested in comprehending it as a distinct classification or form of value.¹³ Now, there is an interesting body of work beginning to investigate how objects become rubbish, how they get to the end of value. My reading of this work identifies several key themes that are worth setting down. The aim is to understand what frames of meaning shape our relations with rubbish and how open these are to transformation. Any possibility of a new materialism and ethics of waste must begin with a different recognition of discarded material. While environmentalism recognizes this in the demand that everybody "reduce, reuse, and recycle," this is only the beginning of the story. The imperative to manage our waste better or avoid the "waste stream" altogether doesn't really get to the heart of how we might come to live differently with things.

The first theme that emerges in recent work in material culture on waste is how reluctant many people are to transfer objects into this category. The rise

of a biographical approach to things has documented the myriad of taxonomies, uses, and valuing regimes that objects can move through before they reach the end of their lives, if they ever do. Kopytoff describes the process in this way:

In the homogenised world of commodities, an eventful biography of a thing becomes the story of the various singularisations of it, of classification and reclassification in an uncertain world of categories whose importance shifts with every minor change of context. As with persons, the drama here lies in the uncertainties of valuation and identity.¹⁴

The creativity of material practices, the constant reincorporation of objects into new classes and systems of exchange and use, makes any essentialist claims about the identity and fixed life cycle of things difficult to sustain. Accounts of the history of things, of their social lives, show that games of value are hard to finish, many things just want to keep on playing. This means that waste, as a point of absolute separation and dematerialization, is often a radical conversion process.

Two studies stand out. Gregson and Crewe's detailed cultural geography of secondhand cultures documents the rich array of classificatory systems and practices that steer things away from the finality of waste. Junk, secondhand, collectables, and retro are a few of the many classifications used to manage and recirculate goods after first-stage consumption.¹⁵ Each classification reflects a specific set of economic, moral, aesthetic, and valuing regimes that work to move objects into various spaces, from the garage to the junk shop to the charity bin; and into different modes of exchange, from philanthropy to barter.

Lucas's study of disposability and dispossession looks at archaeological analyses of waste and comes to similar conclusions: reuse and revaluation are extensive, particularly in relation to things such as clothing, domestic appliances, and furnishings. Dispossession, or the active decision to remove something from one's life and discard it, is as complex a process as possession.¹⁶ What both these studies show is that getting to waste is complicated, and the importance of a material culture perspective is the way it has begun to document this. Gregson and Crewe's research reveals an extraordinary liminal zone in which objects are suspended in time-space awaiting revaluation, their biographies stretched potentially to infinity.¹⁷

But a biographical perspective cannot evade the question of devaluation. Things still get chucked out, constantly, without thought. The ritual of putting out the garbage is one of the markers of the temporality of everyday life. It is also one of the key ways in which we acknowledge the zero degree of value. We need rubbish, as Michael Thompson argues, not just because purification rituals are important to boundaries but also because systems of value depend on a limit point.¹⁸ Thompson's work in Rubbish Theory is important because he shows how rubbish makes possible transformations in use and value. Without a category of rubbish it is impossible to generate new and unexpected structures of value. It is impossible for value to move or change. Thompson identifies two major categories of value to which objects are assigned: "transient" for those things that are decreasing in value over time and "durable" for objects whose value increases over time.¹⁹ Most consumer goods would be in the transient category, antiques or art in the durable. The location of different objects in these categories shapes human relationships and uses. The kids can romp around on the worn-out sofa because it's on the downhill slide of value, they can't touch the deco vase on the mantelpiece because it's precious and irreplaceable.

Value is a product of social processes, not the intrinsic properties of things. Just because things decay and wear out does not mean that they automatically lose value. Signs of aging and use can contribute to increased or auratic value. In the same sense the shiny new plastic cup appears to us as imminent rubbish; disposability makes transient value strikingly visible. The fact of malleability and transformation in value is evidence that objects are not locked into categories because of their material qualities. It is how their materiality is apprehended and used that is the key to value and its transformation. The question is: What is the role of rubbish in this process of shifting value?

Thompson argues that rubbish is central to accounts of the social control of value because it provides the path for the seemingly impossible transfer of objects from transience to durability. Rubbish is a covert category in between the transient and the durable that functions as a valueless limbo in which, at some point, the object may be rediscovered, given new value, and transferred into the category of durability. The examples Thompson uses to develop this argument are decayed inner-city housing that is gentrified and an obscure kitsch Victorian artifact, the Stevengraph, which suddenly became a collector's item in the mid-1960s. In the case of the Stevengraph two key factors were in-

volved in the transformation of value. First, as economic value increased so too did aesthetic value in the form of research, scholarly publications, exhibitions, and museum acquisitions. And second, men controlled the transfer of value from rubbish to durable. While the Victorian purchase and display of Stevengraphs was a feminine occupation, men dominated the transfer from rubbish to collectable. They wrote the authoritative books, organized the exhibitions, and ran the sales. Changes in value are caught up in wider patterns of distinction and status.²⁰

The significance of Thompson's theory is that it offers an explanation of the structural role of rubbish in formations of value. Worthlessness is the condition of possibility for objects to move between different categories. And this movement or process of malleability is grounded not in the intrinsic properties of things but in the new and unexpected uses and functions that people bring to them. However, while Thompson acknowledges that innovation and creativity are crucial to the flexibility of value, he doesn't pursue this. John Frow does in a brief but incisive reading of Rubbish Theory.²¹ Frow develops Thompson's argument by showing how transformations of value are fundamental to person-thing relations: "Objects don't simply occupy a realm of objecthood over and against the human: they translate human interests, carry and transform desire and strategies."²² For Frow, function is a product of use, and the potential uses of things (appropriate and inappropriate) are infinitely variable; "No single game exhausts their function."²³

Frow's nuanced account of person-thing relations is concerned with conversion processes, how things pass from one state to another. While this is the central issue in many studies of material culture, Frow's interest is not in tracking the career of objects, their circulation through different uses and patterns of exchange. Rather, he is concerned with understanding the specific kinds of recognition that mediate distinctions between person and thing.²⁴ His analysis of several different examples shows how things and people coproduce each other. Despite the desire for a world of ontological purity and nonhuman authenticity, things are a product of social relations and affect them at the same time. So, if things are caught up in myriad networks and relations and if they can be framed and used in any number of different ways, what does it mean to reframe rubbish?

As Thompson has shown it means a lot in terms of economies of value because of waste's crucial role in generating change. But what does it mean for

person-thing relations? What triggers a reframing of rubbish, and what inhibits this? If you looked at examples from environmental education you'd assume that all it took was the voice of abstract moral reason, a television ad instructing you to "think again before you throw that out!" Many of these campaigns take a very simplistic approach to our material habitus and how it might be transformed. They tend to ignore how blind we can be to the everyday materiality of objects, how much we can take their instrumentality for granted, and how this blindness is enhanced when we seek to get rid of things. After all, disposal is a kind of purification ritual that restores us to an ordered state; that is its function and its pleasure. Framing things as rubbish doesn't just help us eliminate things from our lives; it also helps us experience the fantasy of self-sovereignty and ontological separateness. In order to be able to reject we have to convert objects into worthless rubbish simply meeting its fate. As one of our most everyday habits, disposal depends on a particular kind of blindness that helps us not see, not acknowledge the things we want to be free of. To throw things away is to subordinate objects to human action, it is to construct a world in which we think we have dominion. This doesn't just deny the persistent force of objects as material presence, it also denies the ways in which we stay enmeshed with rubbishy things whether we like it or not.

So, for rubbish to be framed differently it needs first of all to be noticed, it has to be become conspicuous. Before other possibilities and potentials emerge, before other games of value and use are activated, the phenomenological reality of rubbish has to be acknowledged. We have to recognize discarded objects not as the passive and redundant context for our lives but as mobile, vital matter open to reconstitution.²⁵ One pathway toward this, as I've suggested, might be recognizing waste as things. As Brown argues, things become conspicuous when they are in a state of transition between one thing and another, when they are in the process of being reanimated and resignified.²⁶ Things are different from the material object world and its primary circuits of exchange. They are what's left after objectification breaks down, they are what we suddenly notice when an object seems to drop out of all the systems that give it meaning and value. The tattered sofa on the sidewalk sitting there for days on end awaiting the garbage pickup captures our attention as a thing. Not quite waste yet and definitely out of place, it's just quietly biding its time. Its role in intimate, private lives lingers in the coffee stains on the arms, the permanent slump in the cushions, the secrets it's overhead. Its movement

from the living room to the street, from useful to discarded, defamiliarizes it, putting us into a different relationship with it. Its sensuous physicality beckons, you feel like sitting in it as if for the first time.

Following Brown then, it may be the very thingness of rubbish that can save it from abandonment and that can move it into another system of value or allow us to imagine a new objectification for it. Irregularities of exchange and transitional states make thingness visible. Waste is often found in these situations, out of place, on the edges of order, ephemeral and phenomenal. Rethinking waste means rethinking all the practices that blind us to the reality and possibilities of what remains. This is the ethico-political challenge of waste: imagining a new materialism that would transform our relations with the things that we pretend not to see. But we don't have to imagine this from scratch. Agnes Varda's exploration of gleaning shows us how waste is reimagined and reused with great insight and pleasure.

Varda's film The Gleaners and I is a waste road movie. At the age of seventy-two this leading figure of French new wave cinema took to the road with a digital camera and collected a series of stories about different ways of living with waste. Part documentary on gleaning and contemporary practices of scavenging in France and part reverie on aging, Varda's film is an extraordinary visual essay on wasted and used things and their ethical force. The film is more than just a story of those living on the margins of excess and affluence, it is also a story of objects and their capacity for constant reclassification. Varda's achievement is to open up the question of person-thing relations in such a way that we are able to see the complexities of a different and radical ethics of waste at work. She does this not through moral lesson but through a cinematic technique that celebrates the camera's capacity to glean and the filmmaker's capacity to play with images and stories, to digress, to engage in reverie. Varda calls this cinécriture, a kind of "filmic writing."²⁷ The effect is a series of ethical and aesthetic speculations on waste that is moving and unsettling rather than dogmatic and hectoring. Watching this film we are not being instructed to reform our practices or pity those who live off waste. Rather, we are invited to experience a kind of intimacy and enchantment with the sensuousness of rubbish as things and to witness moments of conversion in which new use values are found for waste.

The value of The Gleaners and I for thinking about a new materialism lies in the way this film documents how people become responsive to waste and open to its possibilities. Through interviews and conversations Varda gives us remarkable access to the various ethico-political justifications people have for gleaning. By inviting people to talk about how they glean, where they do it, and why, she enables us to see the different kinds of recognition people have for waste; what makes them notice it, and what makes them imagine new relations with it. This is more than just the discovery of new uses for discarded things. It is also an exploration of how the creation of use values can be infused with ethical impulses. Gleaning becomes a way of translating a moral unease about excess or an ethic of self-sufficiency and survival into a specific set of material practices and habits. It also becomes a way of staying alive. Desperate need is the most compelling motivation for gleaning, and Varda explores it in depth. Consider the potato sequence.

Driving to the potato fields of Beauce in northern France, Varda ponders the reality of contemporary gleaning. While women did it in groups during the nineteenth century, as captured in Millet's famous painting "The Gleaners" (an image Varda cites as an inspiration for her film), now it is often a solitary practice, and men have taken it up. In a landscape of furrowed earth where an enormous commercial potato crop has just been harvested Varda talks to men stooping and searching for potatoes the grubbing machine has missed. They describe the best times and places to glean, foods to go with potatoes, restaurants they sometimes sell to. They also discuss their relationships with farmers, most of whom are happy to have gleaners clean the fields after harvest because of the savings in labor and chemicals.

The film then cuts to interviews with producers who talk straight to camera about the demands of the market, the restrictions supermarkets place on potato size and shape. What we are hearing is a description of the logic of seriality, the ways in which the commodification of food generates a very restricted set of requirements for what counts as a saleable potato. These restrictions lead to twenty-five tons of potatoes being dumped after each harvest in Beauce. We see the reality of this: trucks on the edges of fields emptying out load after load of edible potatoes. Standing around are people with bags ready to glean. A farmer reflects on the importance of the potato as a staple food and says that with the increase in dumping there has been an increase in gleaning. But at other dump sites there are no gleaners. After all, as Varda

remarks, you never see a notice about the time and date of dumping in the local newspaper. People find out by word of mouth or observation, and this erratic and informal system means that thousands of potatoes go to waste. The camera pans over a landscape of rotting potatoes green with decay, dangerous to eat—the mortification of matter.

All these potatoes, all these different relationships with them; initially, Varda explores the human framing of the potato as a crop, as something to be sold or gleaned. The emphasis is on how diverse human actions manipulate and subordinate the potato to various systems of exchange. For the farmer the potato is a source of profit, for the gleaner it's a free source of food or something to barter with. Various talking heads tell a story about commodity cultures and the dynamics of different regimes of value. The effect isn't ethnographic; Varda avoids exoticizing gleaning and gleaners with an insistent focus on contexts and economic relations. The film shows how objects mediate social relations and how human interests shape different forms of appropriation: making money, surviving on social security. We could think about this as a kind of cinematic biography of potatoes, an account of their career as material, exchangeable objects—and an account of the different status they confer on people. But then there is a moment when this logic is disrupted, when Varda suddenly notices the thingness of one potato, when she is struck by its material self-evidence.

She's filming a man sorting through a big pile of dumped potatoes. As he discusses their remarkable shapes he encounters a heart-shaped one. Varda is surprised and delighted; she reaches out for it, struck by its phenomenology; its texture and shape captivate her. She attempts an awkward close-up, holding the potato in one hand and the digicam in the other. She then starts scrubbling through the pile looking for more. Cut to a table in Varda's apartment covered in heart-shaped potatoes. The camera explores them in close-up, moving sensuously over their surfaces, tracing the blotches on their skin. It's extraordinarily tactile. The camera brings the materiality of the potato into play—we don't just see the potatoes, we feel their dirt and bumps, they seem alive and vital and provocative.²⁸

What is going on in this shift from a cultural biography of potatoes as commodities to a startling cinematic rendering of potatoes as material presence? One minute we're hearing people talk about what they do with potatoes, the next we're gazing at a pile of potatoes on a table, feeling like we could reach

into the screen and pick them up. Is this an effect of the representational techniques of cinema, the camera capturing the world, or has the material force of the thing captured the camera? This if a false opposition, as vigorous debate in film theory has shown; cinema has always been fascinated by objects, and it has always been able to do things with things.²⁹ It has always been able to move them from the backdrop of human action to central characters in the story. There is a distinct cinematic rendering of things that makes them alluring, mysterious, alive, phantasmatic, and strikingly real. But in The Gleaners the issue isn't so much cinematic techniques and referentiality, it is witnessing objects becoming things and the ethical implications of this. The power of the heart-shaped potato lies in the way Varda captures the pleasure of surprise. Her chance encounter with a potato produces a response that is suffused with delight in the self-evidence, or the "suchness," of the phenomenon. Suddenly the potato isn't waste, it isn't a discarded object on the edge of decay, it isn't a testament to the excesses of agribusiness—it's a sensuous, wondrous thing. It's what's left over after all those frames of recognition drop away.

This is surely a case of what Brown describes as objects asserting themselves as things. And, following his schema, it is also a case of a changed subject-object relation. In this scene Varda digresses from the role of gleaner of facts, she takes a detour from the journalistic documentation of waste practices. The heart-shaped potato draws her and the audience into another relation. As she searches for more potatoes she pushes the camera closer and closer until we see the close-up pan over the potatoes on the table. It's impossible not to become caught up in the affect of this scene. The links between the visual and the tactile are striking. We are looking at and touching the potatoes, we are perceiving their texture. And it's through this imbrication of touch and vision that we experience Varda's sensuous enchantment with the thing. Texture makes trouble for any notion of a disembodied spectator, it foregrounds the ways in which looking and feeling are interconnected. As Eve Sedgwick says, a "particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions"; touching and feeling go together; "touching" doesn't just mean cutaneous contact, it means being affected, being altered by feelings.³⁰

Obviously, it's not just the phenomenological resonances of this scene that reorder our relations with waste, it is also the question of affect. Or, to put it in Sedgwick's terms, it is the ways phenomenology and affect are connected. When we encounter waste as things the affective energy that can accompany

this, the sense of wonder or horror, can be the impulse for new relations: a motivation for a different ethics, a sudden inspiration for a new use. In Varda's case the heart-shaped potato triggers a metonymic play from the shape of the heart to charity to those working with the poor and marginalized. The film shifts registers back into documentary mode, and we watch a man discussing how he gleans potatoes to serve in a soup kitchen for the hungry. He talks quietly about being unemployed and wanting to do something useful with his time and about the outrage of good food being dumped while people starve. It's a lovely evocation of a moral framework and motivation that is underlaid with the earlier scene of the beautiful heart-shaped potatoes. To confront the reuse of dumped potatoes as an ethical imperative reverberates with all the associations of them as remarkable physical things. That humble vegetable has got all sorts of holds on us; it can propel us toward acts of generosity and care, entrance us with its beauty and feel. By exploring the multiplicity of ways in which we are mixed up with potatoes—as commodity, as waste, as gift, as things—Varda offers us another way of understanding the ethics of waste. Waste makes claims on us. Reducing waste is not simply a matter of the moral reform of the human, it is also about acknowledging that waste has a kind of agency; that it shares in some of the agency we ascribe only to ourselves.³¹

If the surprise of the heart-shaped potato sequence is that it lets us see wasted objects as vital and alive, the surprise of the hand sequence is that it lets us see a living body as dead. In revealing potatoes as things The Gleaners and I inaugurates a different kind of vision that is not so much instrumental and objectifying as tactile and intersubjective. The subject-object relation is unsettled by the ways in which the heart-shaped potato scene, in its appeal to texture and contact, evokes the multisensory qualities of perception.³² It works because we carry sense memories of touching potatoes, because our hands bear the traces of their feel. But in another sequence we see that hands bear the traces of death.

Later in the film Varda is playing around with her digicam, filming objects in her apartment. She talks about their provenance, the pleasure of living with things collected over time. Suddenly, the digicam captures her free hand, the one that has been pointing at different things. She pauses on it, does a close-up, talking with horror about its wrinkles, blotches, and lines.

The hand is severed from her body, it becomes a thing separate and alien. In the image of her hand Varda sees her own death—the lines, blotches, and wrinkles are evidence of death at work. The hand appears to us as lifeless and worn out; Varda pauses to mourn her own loss. In that surprise glimpse of her hand we see a body asserting itself as a thing.

The surprise of the hand is that the digicam captures it as already dead, it signals its imminent status as waste. The surprise of the potatoes is that they appear to us as alive. How can this be when the visual techniques in these scenes are so similar? Both involve the contingency of a sudden, unexpected revelation; both involve the intensity of a lingering close-up on skin; both reveal the links between phenomenology and affect. Perhaps the difference between the two scenes has to do with waste. In the potato scene a wasted object asserts itself as a vital thing, in the hand scene a living subject becomes dead matter. What both scenes capture is the instability of waste; wasted objects can be reanimated and brought back to life, living subjects will become waste. Things pass from one state to another; waste, like thingness, is not inherent in things, it's a latency, an effect of certain sorts of recognition. Both these scenes trigger those recognitions, they notice waste in ways that disrupt the boundaries between subject and object, human and nonhuman, useful and useless, dead and alive.

The effect of this is to open-up a very different way of thinking about and living with waste. Moral instruction and mastery of the “waste problem” are not the intentions of this film. These two scenes give waste a recognition and potency that make it much more than the bad object of environmental destruction and capitalist excess. Instead, waste becomes a relation in which we sense the force of conversion and transience, of other possibilities emerging, of enchantment and disturbance. In waste we see imagination and ethics coinciding: “I wonder what you could do with this?”

Hands and potatoes perform this different recognition of waste well, but so too do the much straighter documentary sequences in the film, in which Varda resists any tendency toward dogmatism. Her interviews with gleaners all over France are suffused with an openness and respect. People talking about their scavenging practices are filmed with unfailing intelligence and tenderness. Men and women found scrounging in bins behind supermarkets or in fields aren't victimized or shamed. Their anonymity and poverty are challenged by a documentary technique suffused with generosity. Varda isn't

calculating the moral effect of their stories, the gleaners are not being used to generate sympathy. They're simply telling stories about a different kind of material habitus, a different way of living with things. This way of living is tough; surviving on waste involves a lot of work stooping, searching, and sorting. There's no romance in it, but there is dignity, and Varda's careful documentation of the micropractices of gleaning, the legalities of it, and the ways of converting and sharing what's scavenged is a beautiful exploration of the ethic of making do.

“Making do” is also the theme of Bush Mechanics, but in this documentary the focus is on the pleasure and creativity of this practice more than its ethical import. Made in 1998, the film explores the relationship to cars of a group of young Aboriginal men from the Yuendumu community in remote Australia. Funny, innovative, and full of self-parody, Bush Mechanics reveals a completely different set of car practices from those usually seen and celebrated on commercial TV. There are no high-speed chases here, no glossy celebrations of the car as commodity fetish—rather, a set of madcap adventures about driving in the desert in cars chronically on the verge of mechanical collapse. The main content comes from watching these “bush mechanics” solve a variety of technical problems using whatever they can lay their hands on. Punctured inner tubes are replaced with densely matted spinifex grass, brake fluid is made from laundry detergent mixed with water, replacement parts are found on abandoned wrecks that are part of the collective memory in remote desert spaces. All this is evidence of a playful inventiveness prompted not simply by need but also by a robust practical knowledge about various ways of keeping a car moving.³³

While making do is akin to gleaning because it involves scavenging, the term also implies creative reuse with whatever is at hand. Analyses of this practice, also known as bricolage, have been taken up in anthropology (particularly by Lévi-Strauss) and, later, in cultural studies. Bricolage describes the human capacity to imagine and create new uses and meanings for things. This process is more than just reclassification, it involves an active reappropriation of things in different contexts that not only produces new meanings but also reveals the social logic of imagination. The capacity to subvert or erase original meanings and make new uses shows that imagination isn't fanciful or an

activity restricted to leisure or aesthetics, it's a field of everyday social practice. Michel de Certeau has shown how central the arts of making do are to daily life.³⁴ Rituals, habits, routines are all a product of adapting ways of doing things with the material resources available.

While no one would question the fact of everyday creativity, cultural studies accounts of bricolage have tended to overvalorize human actions at the expense of a more relational materiality. Human agency is seen as driving the practice of bricolage, often in the interest of creating an oppositional or resistant identity.³⁵ This has had the effect of making bricolage seem like an act of subversion rather than a quotidian practice driven by pragmatic need. It has also, implicitly, reinforced a sharp opposition between inanimate material and human bodies with consciousness and intention, able to do weird and wonderful things with things.

The question that Bush Mechanics raises is: What if we thought of bricolage not as human activity in the service of identity but as evidence of what Latour calls the "networked quality of things"?³⁶ This is how Bush Mechanics represents the arts of making do, and this is what makes it a wonderful exploration of the relations between rubbish, recognition, and reuse. In this film representations of practical ingenuity continually foreground the heterogeneity of things in the world and the fluidity of their classification; things are continually open to new uses and frames of understandings. This is a road movie in which the ontological separation between the humans and the car is flattened, in which distinctions between mechanical, organic, human, and technological get very mixed up. The narrative momentum in the film is triggered by constant car breakdowns and the desperate desire of the five Yuendumu men to make it into town. Keeping the car moving means finding immediate solutions to a series of increasingly tricky technical problems.

While this scenario sounds like the perfect setting for a celebration of indigenous ingenuity, the film avoids this easy, feel-good representation of difference. Instead, it explores the exchanges and relays between a technology that both organizes human action and is subject to human inscription and will. This is a very demanding car. Keeping it on the road involves a radical openness to the technical possibilities of anything and everything. Consider the flat tire sequence—there's no spare or jack, so another solution has to be found. The men collectively lift the car onto a jerry can so they take the wheel nuts off with a pair of pliers. They then head off into the surrounding desert scrub and

pull out bunches of spinifex to stuff into the tire. This tough desert grass turns out to be a perfectly reasonable substitute for the punctured inner tube.

In another scene the men wander into the scrub searching for a car wreck they think is nearby. It could provide the spare part that they need to keep moving. What unfolds is an alternative perception of the place of rubbish in natural space. For the bush mechanics, car carcasses are perceived as part of the landscape. Incorporated into the meanings of country, they are understood as traces, and, like rocks and mountains, they remain always available for transformation. Car bodies, like all material and organic things, are regarded as transient. While Western eyes might view these wrecks with moral opprobrium, as evidence of a crude disregard for natural purity, in Bush Mechanics they signal the value of traces, of refusing to erase presence. Deborah Bird Rose explains Aboriginal rubbish practices in this way:

My Aboriginal teachers in the Northern Territory rarely picked up after themselves, but more to the point they did not seek to erase themselves. When they go fishing they call out to the ancestors and Dreamings saying, "Give us food, the children are hungry, we got kids here!" When they get food, they cook it on the spot. The remains of the dinner camps tell the stories of how they went to that place and called out to country, and how the country fed them. The remains of people's action in country tell an implicit story of knowledgeable action: these people knew where they were, they knew how to get the food that is there in the country. The country responded to their presence by providing for them, and the remains are evidence of the reciprocity between country and people. In contrast, my teachers held self-erasure to be the equivalent of sneaking around the country.³⁷

So rubbish isn't rubbish, it's a literal trace that is available for transformation. It is part of the network of tracks that register movement and tell of events. It is potentiality, it can transform people and people can transform it. In a later television series of Bush Mechanics Jack Jakamarra Ross, a Yuendumu elder, is filmed wandering in the bush. Suddenly he comes across a defunct engine block. He looks at it closely and says: "This motor grew us up, now it is lying here like a witness looking after us."³⁸ The moment catches the viewer by surprise—here is someone describing how a car engine brought him up. This is far more radical than the common tendency to anthropomorphize your car with a cute name. Jack Jakamarra's account of his relation to an abandoned

engine describes how the technological thing has metamorphosed into an affective agent that continues to watch over him. The thing has exchanged properties with a caring parent.

It's possible to read this scene as evidence of the charming naïveté of indigenous cosmology, but that would involve a denial of its disturbing pleasure and its implications for the meaning of rubbish as nothing but useless matter. The scene is enchanting; it disrupts our confident sense of the order of things, of the boundaries between human and nonhuman. It frames rubbish not as polluting dead object but as part of the landscape capable of bearing witness and always available for transformation.

I am using Jane Bennett's notion of enchantment here. She argues that the experience of enchantment is often linked to material metamorphoses, and that crossings and admixtures reveal the possibilities of radical shifts in meaning and matter. More important is the capacity of material metamorphoses to reveal the instability of ontology. Enchantment, for Bennett, is much more than a spectacular delight; it is a moment of potential ethical transformation. "My wager is that if you engage certain crossings under propitious conditions, you might find that their dynamism revivifies your wonder at life, their morphings inform your reflections upon freedom, their charm energizes your social conscience and their flexibility stretches your moral sense of the possible."³⁹

Both The Gleaners and Bush Mechanics satisfy Bennett's stringent checklist for enchantment. These are dynamic, wondrous films full of the pleasures and possibilities of rubbish. They stretch our "moral sense of the possible," as Bennett says, not by a moralizing critique of capitalism's excess and the burdens of waste, but by exploring the implications of framing rubbish differently. They energize our social conscience by giving us a glimpse of what a different materialism looks like.

Claims about the novelty and value of recycling are sometimes met with derision. For those old enough to remember life before excessive consumption, recycling and reuse were, and still are, unremarkable practices—part of the way in which scarcity is managed and the life of things extended. It is also an ethos that constitutes the careful reuser as an efficient and diligent household manager: waste not, want not. Susan Strasser calls this culture of reuse the “stewardship of objects” and links it to a range of historical factors.⁶ Prior to the emergence of mass consumption in the late nineteenth century and the ethos of disposability that I document in chapter 2, people had greater investments in the objects they used. They had an awareness of the labor involved in making objects, they had skills in creating new uses for objects, and they were actively involved in realizing potential and ongoing use value. Darning socks, sewing rags into rugs, using tea leaves to clean carpets, and using old clothes to make new ones are some of the myriad examples Strasser documents to show how time, labor, and inventiveness underpinned a widespread culture of reuse. The absence of organized state-managed rubbish collection was also a factor. Rubbish was a household problem, something to be dealt with on-site, not handed over to public authorities.

The growth of early manufacturing saw techniques of reuse extended into wider spheres. Strasser’s analysis of this development locates recycling at the heart of early industry. Rag and bone collectors established direct links between households and factories, taking household wastes back to factories for

conversion into products. Wholesalers, peddlers, and storekeepers became waste middlemen, buying waste materials from households, then sorting and baling them for resale to industry. Those short of cash could still participate in the nascent consumer economy by getting credit for valuable wastes and exchanging them for new things.

This account of the rise of manufacturing documents the interdependence between household and factory in terms of the circulation of waste and goods. Strasser says, “Materials literally cycled between households and factories, creating a two-way relationship between manufacturers and consumers.”⁷ Moreover, she shows how an existing culture of reuse in households made the development of certain industries and forms of consumption possible. Households grounded in habits of reuse and conservation had materials readily available for the factories that depended on them; they were also entirely open to the purchase of new things made from old.⁸

Strasser’s history of nineteenth-century waste practices reveals a recycling economy at work long before the reinvention of this term in the 1960s. She shows how waste circulated as a currency in the rise of the factory and how a myriad of diverse systems of exchange from barter to peddling allowed all sorts of people to enterprise waste and extract maximum value from it. Gradually these systems of exchange dispersed, and informal economies were marginalized by the rise of specialized waste dealers and wholesalers who began to dominate the trade in waste. Household wastes became devalued in this process as new and cheaper raw materials were found to substitute for them. Beyond this, the gradual expansion of consumption and mass markets meant that buying new began to acquire status and become a marker of class distinction. The ability to dispose of things without concern, to make waste, was a sign of wealth, and in this way getting rid of things was separated from production, consumption, and use.⁹

This brief history provides an important context for analyses of contemporary recycling. It shows that the forms of reuse and recirculation of waste practiced in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, while prefiguring current practice, were also distinctly different. They did not emerge out of social activism or mass public education, they did not involve representations of nature in crisis, and they did not involve a radical reframing of domestic habits and values. My point is not that earlier versions of recycling are more authentic. Rather, they involved the enactment of a specific cultural economy

that exploited and enhanced already existing networks between waste materials, emergent industry, and household practices. The assemblage of socio-technical relations that constituted nineteenth-century recycling involved the performance of different practices and different calculations of value and subjectivity.

The reinvention of recycling in the 1960s was a product of quite different forces. It involved a diverse set of discourses and techniques that had to be disseminated, stabilized, and implanted in practices of various kinds from the governmental to the domestic. Tracking these forces illuminates how rubbish became an object of new economic relations and recycling a source of ethical self-improvement. While current recycling involves similar movements of waste from homes back to industry, the personal meanings of this practice, how its value is calculated, the business and government organizations that are involved, and the rationalities that justify it mean that the way we recycle now is a vastly different practice from its antecedents. We are dealing with another cultural economy altogether.

A thorough-going genealogy of recycling is not my aim. Rather, I want to deploy a set of loosely genealogical methods to track how contemporary recycling became thinkable, and in what ways it connected a set of cultural and social objectives about domestic waste practices to the recovery of commodity value in rubbish. I'm concerned, here, with sketching discursive shifts, with exploring how language and ideas capture and construct events. Three broad shifts were crucial to the reinvention of recycling: the rise of an environmental movement that problematized nature, debates about the effects of excessive consumption, and shifts in the economics of the waste management industry prompted by the governmental discovery of "the waste crisis."

Most accounts of the reinvention of recycling cite the rise of environmental movements as crucial. In the 1960s environmentalists began protesting about the excesses of rapid capital expansion evident in belching smokestacks, contaminated waterways, and increasingly visible urban waste. Initially, the target of this discourse was industry. Industrial pollution was seen as the main cause of ecological destruction, and this is why factories and their filthy by-products featured heavily in apocalyptic accounts of nature under siege. This emergent concern for "the environment" framed nature as passive and vulnerable to gross exploitation by rampaging capital. The political effects of this movement were the development of an increased regulatory framework for

industry, evident in the rise of antipollution and other environmental laws in most capitalist democracies; the creation of specific bureaucracies such as environmental protection agencies; and a range of other legislative initiatives and reforms that acted to safeguard nature. This representation of human activity destroying nonhuman nature is classically modernist. As Ghosh and Muecke argue, it puts man at the center of the story surrounded by an "environment," and it perpetuates the idea of a fundamental opposition between nature and culture.¹⁰ Rather than framing the human and nonhuman relation in terms of interconnection, early environmentalism privileged notions of protection.

Paralleling the rise of environmentalism was a less prominent discourse about cultures of consumption and the problem of abundance. Vance Packard's 1963 widely read classic, The Hidden Persuaders, is often cited as the key source of this critique.¹¹ Packard's polemic exposed consumption practices to sweeping moral critique.¹² American consumers were buying too much. They had been seduced by the cult of the new and were victims of the planned obsolescence of industry, which trapped them in a treadmill of disposability. Their values were being eroded by the rise of freely available credit that fuelled the pressure to consume. Hedonism and the effects of material abundance, evident in the incredible glut of things in homes, were producing a population that lacked restraint and prudence and found satisfaction in self-indulgent, conspicuous consumption.

While environmentalism was concerned with the state of nature, Packard was concerned with the state of the "average citizen of the United States." His book pursues the question: "What is the impact of all this pressure towards wastefulness on the United States and on the behavior and character of its people?"¹³ This focus on character, on the kind of ethos and sensibility that overconsumption produces, establishes a very different connection between practices of self-fulfillment and shopping. While the discourses of consumer sovereignty represented shoppers in a state of permanent and occasionally ecstatic self-actualization, Packard saw most consumption as fundamentally wasteful: unnecessary, frivolous, and offering false satisfaction. Although he was scathing in his attack on business practices and the ways in which industry's demands for economic growth advocated waste, his primary focus was the moral decline of the citizen shopper.

What this argument did was constitute the household and domestic habits as a field open to action. Packard's recommendations for change and reform

advocated a range of practices aimed at helping consumers "regain a posture of self-respect in the shopping situation."¹⁴ Rejecting products that favored fashion over function, developing techniques of prudence and restraint, doing volunteer work rather than going to the mall, and ignoring advertising were all seen as restoring the psychological health of the shopper and giving him or her a sense of pride and dignity.

Packard's argument was moralistic and nostalgic, but its wider resonances were important. In criticizing consumption practices and household habits he prefigured the emergence in the mid-1960s of not only consumer rights but also consumer responsibility. His representation of consumers was ambiguous; they were both the victims of gross manipulation by big business and activist subjects who could and should take steps in their everyday lives to resist the rise of wastefulness and disposable culture. Shopping became infused with guilt, and shoppers became open to reform and improvement, with the development of a new conscience and lifestyle.

The final discursive shift necessary to the reinvention of recycling was the construction of a waste crisis. This was partially an effect of environmentalism, which had consistently used images of mountains of waste to push its message. It was also a result of shifts in governmental practices around waste and pressures on the economics of the waste industry. The complex intersections of these forces led to the identification of the "waste problem." While versions of this story vary according to different locales and political structures, the basic plot remains the same. From the late 1970s governments at all levels began noting the increasing costs of waste removal and disposal. Waste has always been a major infrastructure cost for public administration, but by the 1970s growing amounts of waste and the decline in suitable landfill sites began to generate shifts in how waste was framed as a governmental issue. Technocratic discourses about waste that focused on how to get rid of it fast and cheaply were displaced by new approaches that problematized waste as a worrying cause of spiraling government cost blowouts and environmental degradation.

Waste was no longer the exclusive object of engineering and the transport industry; it was now configured as a problem of how we lived. Consider, for example, this opening sentence of a government report on waste from the early 1980s: "Australians are among the world's largest generators of municipal solid waste on a per capita basis and this reflects our life style and high standard of living."¹⁵ Here, the source of excessive waste is shifted from in-

dustry to the household and "lifestyle." In the same report waste is also represented as an unexploited resource, as an unacceptable burden on the environment, and as part of that amorphous network described as civic responsibility. The effect of these new governmental discourses was the gradual replacement of disposal with management. The emergence of terms like minimization, audits, sustainability, and recycling constituted waste as something to be "managed" in the interests of industry efficiency and environmental care. This generated substantial transformations across all levels of social and economic administration, from the macrolevel of legislative change to the microlevel of the household. The question is, how did household practices become implicated in wider reforms of waste management? And how were these transformations experienced in everyday life? What reordering of personal habits and relations to rubbish emerged as a result?

The widespread implementation of curbside recycling programs in late capitalist countries from the 1970s is generally seen as the touchstone of the shift from thoughtless disposal to careful management. It is also one of the most significant changes in personal conducts around rubbish in the late twentieth century. The diverse discursive, political, and economic forces that underpinned this change produced a new network of socio-technical relations around some sorts of waste, how it was managed in households, how it was collected, and what became of it after pickup.

The normalization of recycling could not have happened without the convergence of three crucial ideas that made it thinkable: environmental crisis, living responsibly, and rubbish as a resource. Each of these ideas was central to promoting recycling, to putting householders into new relations with their rubbish, and to showing subjects how the performance of certain actions would make them into virtuous "recyclers." In different ways these ideas formed the distinct set of calculations of benefit that the implementation of recycling depended on. Households may have had little choice in changing their rubbish practices, but the extent of the take-up of recycling, the sense in which populations willingly embraced it, willingly acted on themselves, is evidence that more than coercion or discipline was at stake.¹⁶ Recycling policies linked processes of subjectivity and self-actualization with wider governmental reforms in waste administration. As a political technology these policies and programs established a connection between the state of the environment, personal practices, and economic benefit.

The reinvention of recycling from the 1970s onward involved a set of meanings and practices very different from those of its antecedents. The calculations of its benefits were inextricably linked to the concept of "nature" as an abstract singular space in need of care and protection. As I've argued, this conceptualization of nature is relatively recent, a product of the rise of political ecology and environmentalism. What recycling did was shift the focus of environmentalism from industry and production to households and consumption. It personalized rhetorics of global environmental degradation by implicating everyday practices like shopping and putting out the garbage. These were now part of the problem, and recycling was a way of making them part of the solution. "Acting locally," as in changing your household habits, aligned reform of the self with global environmental good.

Nature under threat situated contemporary recycling in a new set of moral and economic relations. It expanded the ethical claims of this practice way beyond an ethos for living prudently. While household practices were fundamental to nineteenth-century forms of recycling, the targeting of households from the 1970s on was based on a very different set of rationales. Contemporary householders do not seek to enterprise their waste, to use it to enhance income or to barter for goods; they get no economic returns for recycling. Householders' actions go unrewarded except in ethical terms. The money is made higher up, when local government or recycling collection companies sell the materials that have been voluntarily sorted by householders. In the contemporary cultural economy of recycling there are diverse calculations of its benefit: ethical, environmental, and economic. And it is the tensions between these different measures of value that feature in debates over whether recycling is actually worth it.

In 1996 the New York Times Magazine published an article by John Tierney titled "Recycling Is Garbage."¹⁷ In it Tierney rails against the fervor for recycling. He accuses Americans of being racked with "garbage guilt" and supporting an activity that is basically inefficient and wasteful:

Recycling does sometimes make sense—for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill. . . . Mandatory recycling programs aren't good

for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups—politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations. . . . Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.¹⁸

Tierney's critique challenges every claimed benefit of recycling, from environmental improvement to cost saving. By his calculations recycling is economically irrational. The costs of administering household collection programs far outweigh the profits to be gained from the reuse of waste and the benefits to nature. The money spent on maintaining a massive recycling apparatus would be much better allocated to schools and welfare.

Tierney's argument has plenty of shock value. In challenging the accepted benefits of recycling he privileges economic efficiency as the best technique for evaluating waste management. Despite all the fuss, however, this critique is nothing new. Since the reinvention of recycling there have been continual debates over its value. The rise of recycling has spawned a massive array of social technologies—from evaluation, to focus groups, to economic impacts modeling—all aimed at capturing and assessing its costs and benefits. The mountain of reports and facts and figures produced both represent recycling and make it available to different sorts of calculative agency. This diverse and contradictory knowledge of recycling is used, for example, by governments to justify changes in waste collection, by environmental groups in various campaigns, by advertising agencies in the social marketing of recycling. This knowledge becomes active in the production, performance, and ordering of a multiplicity of relations and activities that constitute recycling as a material practice. In seeking to analyze the benefits of recycling the issue is not which technique of evaluation is right or wrong, which gets closest to the "real" cost of recycling. Rather, we should investigate what measures of value various assessments of recycling deploy, and what sorts of calculative agency they produce, particularly for the domestic recycler.

Many assessments of recycling begin with a discussion of the dangers of overvaluing this activity. A common representation is of a waste management apparatus that is enormously cumbersome, in terms of both collection and reconstitution, that feels good but costs a fortune. Echoing Tierney, these assessments point to the difficulties in making "realistic" calculations in the light of inflated environmental claims and suspect emotions: "Even the most ardent

supporters of recycling must accept that recycling is not a panacea for our environmental problems, nor should it be pursued to the point of diminishing returns or at any cost.¹⁹

This approach deploys cost-benefit analysis, a technique that frames "benefit" in terms of efficient arrival at a specifiable bottom line that is generally monetary. The calculative logic of this technique is derived from economic measurements that seek to assess whether the costs of collecting, transporting, storing, cleaning, and developing special manufacturing techniques to use recyclable wastes are outweighed by the profits that are made selling them. This sort of calculation is what Barbara Herrnstein Smith terms "classic utilitarianism"; it links measures of economic value to technical notions of efficiency, practicality, and instrumentality.²⁰ It also establishes utility as a pure good and seeks to exclude any nonutilitarian variables as irrelevant and contaminating.

The second form of calculation that recycling has been subjected to measures all the risks and benefits that the first model resolutely excludes as incalculable; all those heterogeneous and subtle measures of value like "community benefit," "environmental impacts," and "consumer awareness." These are the measures classic utilitarianism rejects as resolutely "noneconomic." Smith defines this alternative and often marginalized form of calculation as "anti-utilitarian humanism."²¹ And, despite the assumption that these two forms of calculation—the utilitarian and the humanist—are fundamentally antagonistic, part of the great divide between economy and culture, she contends that they are not fundamentally discontinuous. They both involve the same methodology, cost-benefit calculations, it is just that this technique is mobilized by different discourses of value and is defended and justified according to different interests. While classic utilitarianism assesses economic benefits in the interests of rationality and efficiency (i.e., specifically market-driven associations), antiutilitarian humanism defines benefit in terms of a range of cultural and symbolic variables in the interests of more diffuse values like protection of the environment, community involvement, or individual contribution.

In many assessments of recycling, however, these two techniques of evaluation are not opposed. They are combined to produce hybridized calculations in which the economic and the cultural are recognized as thoroughly enmeshed. Economic rationality is not seen as overriding other measures of value. Instead, economic processes are understood as interdependent with the

cultural via a network of relations that make it difficult to identify clear distinctions between exploiting waste's potential as a resource and everyday social practices that seek to manage it with ethical concern.

An excellent example of this hybridized technique of calculation can be found in a 1990 report titled Interim Report on Paper Recycling. This seemingly innocuous report, one of many in the mountain of government documents on recycling, makes an extraordinary effort to measure and value the role of households and voluntary individualism in facilitating recycling. It argues that householders, through their time and effort, currently bear the primary cost of waste separation and sorting. This activity is fundamental to the operations of the recycling industry; without it recycling would not be economically feasible. The report acknowledges that the economic benefits of recycling depend on specific household practices voluntarily and willingly carried out by the population; and that this voluntary contribution has taken place in the face of steadily increasing charges for domestic waste removal.

In other words, there has been no economic incentive for householders to embrace the new classification and separation activities that recycling demands. Most are paying more for restricted waste services that involve more personal effort. How, then, do householders calculate the benefits of recycling? According to the report, most people surveyed saw the benefits of recycling as entirely ethical; they recycled because they were "motivated by a concern for the environment."²² This report documents a widespread moral attachment to recycling and shows that it is impossible to reduce this waste practice to a purely economic logic. Instead, what is revealed is a network of practices and benefits that are heterogeneous and not entirely coherent. As an industry recycling can function only with the assistance of free labor from householders, this underpins its economic viability. But the people who perform this labor do not experience themselves as volunteer workers in the recycling industry. They do not generally assess their actions as economically relevant. Rather, in performing the actions of a "recycler" they think of themselves as doing something good for nature and the environment. They see themselves as performing ethical, not economic, work.

In recognizing the complex interconnections between economic and cultural processes this report on waste paper foregrounds the crucial role of everyday

domestic actions in assessing the wider impacts of recycling. This emphasis on material practices in the home makes it possible to see how recycling is much more than a set of policies programmed into bodies, it is a distinct performance. Law argues that cultural and economic processes don't exist in the abstract, they have to be enacted. These enactments involve a set of heterogeneous elements, all of which are performing to produce certain relations, orderings, and calculations of value. Material practices extend beyond humans; they implicate technical, architectural, geographical, and corporeal arrangements.²³ Recyclers, then, are not active agents managing their passive waste; recyclers are part of a network of relations in which used newspapers and empty bottles, the containers they're put in, the trucks that pick them up, the companies that buy them, and the governmental and popular discourses that justify these actions all become vital elements in the performance of environmental good and a distinctive subjectivity. For the householder, the carefully sorted containers on the street are a gift to the environment that symbolically confers value on the person who placed them there. This value is both ethical and affective. Recycling makes many people feel good, this is the calculative benefit that motivates the repeated performance of sorting and rinsing, week after week. These actions don't just produce the subjectivity "recycler," they also connect this subject to "the environment," giving minor domestic actions an ethical resonance.

This way of arranging the elements of recycling and producing distinct calculations about its value is, however, entirely contingent. Strasser's analysis of the nineteenth-century history of reuse has already shown that. An account of recycling in Japan offers different evidence of how recycling can generate quite diverse modes of calculative agency and material semiotic relations. Sandra Buckley tells a fascinating story about Japanese recycling that shows how this practice become incorporated into wider networks of status and competition between housewives.²⁴ While waste reduction may have been the ostensible policy objective, in practice this goal was often displaced by the zealous desire to use recycling to display domestic skills and impress the neighbors.

In the 1980s the municipality of Otsu in the Osaka-Kyoto region introduced a new garbage disposal system aimed at streamlining collection and recycling. Households were issued five sets of colored garbage bags, each representing a different type of waste product: glass, metals, combustibles, plastics, and paper. Once these bags were filled with the correct waste matter,

householders had to take them to a centralized collection point on the correct day of the week to be picked up. Each type of bag was picked up on a different day. Bags could not be left outside this collection point overnight. They were also labeled, on one side with detailed instructions on how to handle the waste matter before putting it in the bag, on the other with a slogan declaring allegiance to the "Movement for the Reduction of Volume of Refuse." Below this was a space where each household name was to be written. As Buckley says, "Each family was thus expected to own both its garbage and its performance as a member of the community."²⁵ Even when protests led to the removal of the space for the name of the household on bags, 80 percent of householders continued to write their names on the bags, keen to display their compliance with a new garbage regime.

This recycling apparatus was technically complex and time consuming, particularly for housewives. Discursively, its object was not so much the production of an environmentally concerned subject as the reduction of waste in the name of civic duty and obedience. This obedience was often overlaid with techniques that turned recycling into competitive display. Buckley describes how in other parts of Japan a company marketed clear garbage bags with enormous success. These bags gave housewives the chance to display their waste, in order

to demonstrate not only the quality of their garbage but also their level of professionalization: perfectly peeled fruit skins, neatly compressed milk cartons, perfectly folded scraps of paper. One could also demonstrate the level of technological sophistication of the household—electronically opened cans, pre-shredded waste paper, cans compacted by an electronic crusher, assorted waste from brand name appliances. . . . Garbage is treated by the professional housewife as a serious opportunity to be judged by her peers.²⁶

Buckley's account describes a very different way of drawing the elements of recycling together. The socio-technical effect of the see-through garbage bag is to make rubbish active in conferring status on the housewife. Food scraps and milk cartons, which are now visible, become agents in neighborhood relations and rivalry. Buckley's final assessment is that the emphasis on recycling as heightened public performance has had little impact on producing less rubbish in Japan. Instead, recycling has become an integral element of household ritual and neighborhood dynamics. The calculation of its value is linked not

to concern for the environment but to conscientious domestic practice and the status and identity of the professional housewife. "Environmentalists trying to link local issues of waste disposal to global issues of deforestation describe a sense of frustration at the public resistance to translating these connections into action in everyday consumer practice."²⁷

The case of Japan highlights how recycling as a cultural economy involves contingent and materially heterogeneous logics and relations. There are different styles of recycling, each generating distinct practices, subjectivities, and techniques for calculating the worth of this activity. Accepting this diversity, I am still troubled by the problem of how to assess it in more general political terms. I still want to pursue the question of whether recycling does or could make a difference to environmental decline.

While a cultural economy approach is useful for understanding how recycling works as a socio-technical arrangement, it offers few tools for judging recycling's political and environmental impacts. It has helped identify the particular techniques of calculation that are produced in different styles of recycling. But what to make of this? Is recycling good? What calculations could be mobilized to judge its effects, and what kind of critical consciousness could be brought to bear on it? These questions demand a different mode of analysis. They demand a shift from a largely descriptive analysis to a normative analysis. In making this shift I do not want to adopt the usual terms of critique set down in environmentalist rejections of recycling. Rather, I want to assess this activity as an example of a gift economy. This opens up other lines of analysis that allow us to consider in what ways recycling functions as a minor practice that, through the gesture of generosity, changes how we relate to waste. But how generous is recycling, and who benefits from its gifts?

Timothy Luke provides a good example of the standard environmentalist critique of recycling:

In the ruse of recycling, green consumerism, rather than leading to the elimination of massive consumption and material waste, instead revalorizes the basic premises of material consumption and massive waste. By providing the symbolic and substantive means to rationalize resource use and cloak consumerism in the appearance of ecological activism, the cult of recycling as well as the call

to save the earth are not liberating nature from technological exploitation. On the contrary, they cushion, but do not end the destructive blows of an economy and a culture that thrive upon transforming the organic order of nature into the inorganic anarchy of capital.²⁸

As passionate as this critique is, it is not the approach I want to take. While I agree with Luke's assessment that high-consumption Western lifestyles are unsustainable, I am uneasy with the effects of this familiar cultural narrative. The moralism and hectoring tone victimize nature as the passive other to human exploitation and the anarchy of capital, generating a sense of despair and cynicism. When the exploitative force of power is so overcoded, why bother contesting it? I am uncomfortable with this representation of recycling as another example of disenchantment and destruction. It leaves no space for any recognition of the sensibilities and ethical attachments recyclers may feel for this activity or for the role of ethical practice in change. For Luke, recycling is a ruse because recyclers are blind to the "real" impacts of their actions—though he, of course, isn't. If we accept this critique then we have to negate the evaluations recyclers make of their practices, we have to dismiss their ethical experience as nothing more than false consciousness.

In rejecting this approach I am not seeking to become an apologist for recycling, to suggest that tokenism is better than nothing. Rather, I want to develop another line of analysis that facilitates a critical and careful assessment of the ethico-political implications of recycling for social justice. I want to shift the terms of judgment from whether recycling is good for the environment to how it is experienced as "good" by recyclers. And in what ways is this goodness or ethical value transacted? As I've argued, many evaluations of recycling document a deep moral attachment to this practice, but what is the nature of this attachment? Could the voluntary work that constitutes household recycling function like a gift economy? If so, what is the nature of the gift and whose generosity is recognized?

In focusing on the social rather than environmental impacts of recycling I don't want to dismiss questions of ecological decline and the exploitation of nature. As Andrew Ross has argued, social and environmental justice are inextricably connected: "Resource shortages and ecological degradation are primarily a result of uneven social measures that manufacture scarcity all over the world for the economic and political gain of powerful interests."²⁹ Accepting

this fundamental connection, what kinds of scarcity and exploitation are necessarily forgotten in the gesture of Western recycling, and how might this be challenged? What are the productive dimensions and possibilities of recycling? Could it be the basis for extended and transformed relations with nature, with commodities, and with those who have nothing to recycle?

The idea of the gift is a useful way to start pursuing these questions, for gifts foreground questions of generosity and the relations between those who give and those who receive. In many campaigns promoting recycling the practice is represented as a gift: "Be a good sort—the environment will thank you." The effort that is entailed is framed not in terms of coercion or compliance but as a magnanimous gesture. Generosity and concern for nature are seen to overrule self-interest. Recycling isn't a duty; it's a way of deliberately and carefully giving up your waste as a means to making the world better. These are the terms in which it is possible to think about recycling as a gift economy and to consider the nature of the generosity that underlies it.

Recent debates about the nature of the gift have focused on its "constitutive ambivalence."³⁰ This ambivalence centers on whether it is possible for the gift to escape the transaction of value, to be truly gratuitous and therefore outside the play of social interest. Most argue that it isn't, and while the bases of this assessment may differ, the effect is to render the gift impossible.³¹ Gift economies are inevitably caught up in the logic of a social contract, a relation of obligation and reciprocity that means that generosity cannot escape the calculation of benefit: What's in it for me? This calculative role does not mean that generosity is without virtue or moral import, but it does limit the possibilities of the gift in certain ways.

Rosalyn Diprose's account of corporeal generosity opens up an important line of thinking beyond the existing aporia of the gift.³² For Diprose, generosity is fundamental to the pursuit of sociality and social justice, but, in order for us to realize this, it has to be understood as more than an individual gesture and virtue. She begins with a careful elaboration of the limits of theories of generosity that frame it within the logic of a social contract. Generosity can be cultivated and habituated and can involve the deliberate choice to give beyond the call of duty. It can enhance the well-being of the recipient and give pleasure to the giver, but this relation can never escape an economy of exchange between sovereign individuals in which "virtue is the subject of calculation."³³

Moreover, when one is obligated to give, when it becomes a duty, then generosity is not in play. In both these cases the capacity to give presumes a reflexive, separate individual whose choices are guided by careful deliberation. According to Diprose, generosity should not be reducible to an economy of exchange between sovereign individuals. This structuring of the gift can never contribute to social justice because, when the freedom to give is claimed, individual self-sovereignty and property ownership are seen as pregiven, as coming before generosity: "In claiming freedom and property as one's own, something has already been taken from others. The generosity of the individual property owner who gives his or her acquisitions . . . is built on the generosity of others."³⁴ In other words, some forms of generosity confer value and identity on the giver, but this is done at the expense of a certain forgetting, a denial of the gifts of others who are rendered invisible or less worthy.

Diprose's critique makes trouble for the idea of recycling as a gift in several important ways. First, it shows that the logic of duty and obligation that people may feel in relation to this practice undercuts the possibility of generosity. Resentment would seem a much more likely response. Second, even those who document an experience of ethical satisfaction in recycling, who find pleasure in giving to the environment, cannot escape an exchange relation. In return for the cultivation of careful habits they enhance their identity as virtuous. And finally, the capacity to recycle, to give away not just waste materials like paper and glass but clothes, furniture, used toys, or whatever, depends on the generosity of others. Giving—rather than throwing away—acquisitions so that they can be incorporated into new systems of value is generally a product of personal patterns of consumption that are not simply excessive but also wasteful. The capacity to overconsume is a minority privilege that masks not only the conditions of production—who makes the things we desire and in what conditions—but also the ecological consequences of an economy driven by the logic of growth at all costs. Recycling gives recognition to the voluntary gestures of the overconsuming householder, but it forgets the gifts of those who suffer to produce commodities and the natural resources that are exploited to make them.

These factors would seem to be enough for us to abandon the idea of recycling as a gift. It appears to meet all of Diprose's criteria for a debased generosity. Recycling depends on selective forgetting; it does not contest the social and environmental inequities that support overconsumption. Its ethico-political

effects perpetuate an asymmetrical distribution of recognition, resources, and power. Analyzing recycling in terms of a gift economy confirms Luke's pessimistic assessment.

Despite this assessment, there are other ways in which the concept of generosity can be framed. Diprose argues that a corporeal approach to generosity challenges the aporia of the gift. This approach not only escapes the limits of the social contract, it also foregrounds social justice questions in a more radical and productive way. Corporeal generosity "is not reducible to an economy of exchange between sovereign individuals. Rather, it is an openness to others that not only precedes and establishes communal relations but constitutes the self as open to otherness."³⁵

Three elements shape Diprose's corporeal generosity. First, generosity is a force for transformation only if it goes unrecognized. This means that it is not driven by deliberate choice or conscious intention. Rather, the openness to others that characterizes corporeal generosity is carnal and affective. Second, the asymmetrical relations of recognition and forgetting that underpin giving are a product of asymmetrical evaluations of different bodies—and, I would add, of asymmetrical evaluations of human as opposed to nonhuman resources. In excessive consumption the exploitation of human and natural resources is forgotten. Finally, this network of social discrimination and inequity operates in and through the normalization of bodies. Challenging this injustice depends on intercorporeal relations that are open to difference, that are affective, and that overcome self-sovereignty and the egoism that underpins it.

Is it possible, then, to develop an ethics of waste predicated on corporeal generosity? If we accept that the existing waste habit of recycling cannot escape the logic of obligation and reciprocity, what transformations are necessary to challenge the symbolic capital that recycling generates? How might the righteousness of recyclers be undone? Does the habit of recycling contain possibilities for more radical and just waste practices in which a corporeal generosity might emerge?

Recycling is an example of a minor change in habits around waste. Its implementation involved a different bodily disposition and performance, a different way of doing things with old paper and empty containers. In previous sections the meanings of this practice, the different kinds of calculative agency and socio-technical relations that it produced, are examined. On the basis of this analysis it is wrong to assume that agency comes before actions, that the

thinking self makes the body change its habits. As Diprose says: "The self does not have an identity except through action. The deed, act or performance is the self actualized."³⁶ Despite all the representations of recycling as a new waste policy smoothly transmitted to the population, my argument is that it was through changes in the bodily actions and habits of waste management that the recycler was constituted. The performance of a new identity emerged through acts and an assemblage of different material and technical relations. And while these acts have come to be framed within the logic of a social contract and the calculation of virtue, within them another, more corporeal, form of generosity might lurk.

Diprose's criteria for a corporeal generosity offer an inspiring framework for how a more just and sustainable ethics of waste could function. Rather than a minor change in habits that confers virtue on the dutiful recycler, waste practices based on corporeal generosity would involve a body that was open to the difference of waste and the nonhuman world; a body that was aware of how its ways of living depended on the gifts of others. It would mean a body that was not indifferent to waste's alterity but aware, instead, of the intersubjective links that always connect us to what we discard.

In making us handle waste differently recycling has made us open to the materiality of waste in ways that chucking it in the bin denies. The boundary between self and waste becomes ambiguous when new habits allow wasted things to become more familiar, to imprint us with their phenomenological specificity: the cardboard box that's surprisingly tough to crush, the sharp edge of the empty can, the dress that is being given to charity that still feels and smells new. In the physical work of recycling, waste things become incorporated into new movements and habits as the body becomes open to waste. This doesn't necessarily make us think about how most of the waste we make comes from exploited labor and goes to an exploited nature. But it does entangle us in new relations and bodily practices that could be the first small step toward a more radical ethics of waste that is based on corporeal generosity rather than just "doing the right thing."

three-quarters empty, or bits of rubbish missed the truck and are strewn on the road. The boundary between clean and dirty is not at all stable.

Before I get to these examples I want to outline what Phillips means by the arts of transience. The development of this concept in his book Darwin's Worms is stimulating and inspiring. He shows how it is possible to pursue the connections between waste and loss without recourse to despair or moralism. Phillips's account of how Darwin and Freud thought about change and transience shows how ethics infuse the most ordinary practices. His emphasis on the "arts" of transience resonates with Foucault's account of ethics as the arts of living. It reminds us that a key element of a sustainable ethic of waste is facilitating careful transition in the most ordinary gestures of daily life. Phillips shows how, in giving up the delusions of immortality and purity (which are doomed to continuous failure), we are compelled to invent ways of living that presume interdependency, intermingling, and loss. And scenes of loss—big and small—provide powerful opportunities for such invention. As he says, "Losing is an art, it inspires a new quality of attention."¹⁰

Transience is everywhere; things change. We can see it in our bodies; we can see it in the broken remains of objects that once were new. Phillips's question is: Why is this so daunting? What is our relationship to change; how could we become more at ease with endings? Using the work of Darwin and Freud he explores how these two key thinkers of secular modernism tried to figure out the place of death in the ways we live. Rejecting the comfort of religious redemption and nostalgia for an idealized pastoral nature, both sought to explain how it was possible to retain interest and happiness in the world once you acknowledged death and suffering. If you accept that death is one of the organizing principles of life, how do you escape the pull of grief or nihilism? Phillips suggests that we can do so by becoming realistic, by accepting transience rather than transcendence, by learning to live with death in ways that affirm life.

The most powerful evocation of this thesis is in Phillips's reading of Darwin's book Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits (1881).¹¹ In Darwin's theories of earthworms, Phillips finds an account of an exemplary moral universe. He argues that Darwin's exploration of the biological functions of worms is also, implicitly, a moral and philosophical analysis of the meanings of transition. Rather than dismiss worms as trivial because they occupy the bottom of hierarchies—high-low, surface-underground—Darwin rejects these binaries and argues

that worms are sophisticated and heroic laborers that manage transition, or the space in between these opposed terms. He refuses the typical association of worms with lowliness, death, and decay and sees them, instead, as fundamental to the making and remaking of the world. Their constant digesting work reveals another sort of loss, a loss that is not destructive but transformative, loss that is also renewal. In praising the inexhaustible work that makes the earth fertile Darwin celebrates the resilience and inventiveness of nature. He replaces a Christian creation myth with a secular maintenance myth: worms create the earth, not God. What Darwin finds in worms, according to Phillips, is a moral universe predicated on collaborative generosity. Worms' digestion is not a form of altruism, it is gratuitously virtuous; they provide good things without intending to and show us the paradoxical interconnections between destruction and renewal. Despite their thoroughgoing involvement with decay, worms are on the side of life: "They buried to renew: they digested to restore."¹²

I want to tell some worm stories now that show the arts of transience in action. My aim is to think about their ethical significance, to reflect on how they alter ways of living and embodiment. How have worms been deployed in a politics of active experimentation with waste?

In a very old house in Sydney a few miles from the city center sits the now famous sustainable house. It's a typical nineteenth-century terrace from the outside, narrow and unremarkable. Inside it looks pretty similar to most old houses occupied by a busy family. It's been stylishly renovated with all mod cons, the glass sliding doors at the rear looking onto a lovely landscaped bush garden. But beneath all this inner urban normality is a vastly different infrastructure making the house function: providing power and water and dealing with waste. The house runs on solar power collected from roof panels, with any excess going back into the grid. Potable water is collected from the roof and filtered using sophisticated carbon technology. All waste water from the house flows into a Dowmus waste system, which uses earthworms and microorganisms to break down and filter human effluent, gray water, and food scraps. This waste management system sits outside the back door. It looks like a long garden seat (and that is another function) running along the length of the tiny backyard. Inside worms manage the household waste. At the end of

the system, water, which is mostly free of pathogens, is pumped through a compact ultraviolet light disinfectors to ensure that it is completely sterile. This water is then used to wash clothes and flush the toilet, with any excess pumped into a reed bed at the bottom of the garden.

While this house is exemplary and pretty unusual in a very dense urban area, it is not exceptional as far as examples of sustainability go. It does all the right things—uses renewable energy, collects rainwater rather than letting it run away down a storm-water system, and manages its waste on-site. This house sits very lightly on the ground; it shows us how we can live far more sustainably without sacrificing "quality of life." It still has a bidet and a dishwasher; being inside it doesn't feel like participating in an alternative lifestyle. Assessments of the house have calculated that it saves over 26,500 gallons of water from Sydney's water supply, keeps more than 21,000 gallons of storm water out of Sydney Harbour, and prevents more than 16,000 gallons of sewage from being pumped into the Pacific Ocean. If environmental ethics are about calculating the impacts of human practices on natural systems, then these figures are impressive.¹³ There is no question that the residents of this house should have an easier conscience, but what about the impacts of these different systems on their habits? What does it mean to live with worms eating your shit outside your back door? How does the fact of a different technique for waste management reverberate across the bodies that live there?

When I first visited this house I went on one of its regular public tours. We were shown through the interior and invited to inspect the various systems keeping the house functioning. Then we went into the backyard, and someone asked about waste and whether the house was hooked up to the sewer. The owner showed us the six-foot-long worm farm masquerading as a garden seat. He lifted the lid and let us smell the fecund odor of decay. He poked around and showed us the worms heroically laboring. He collected some water from the end of the system and showed us how clean it was. "You could drink this," he declared. Everyone in the tour shuddered and then laughed with horror. Purity and danger were evoked, the excess of laughter releasing the tension of a taboo transgressed.

Here was a house where it was possible to see the arts of transience in action. Traditional systems of elimination that remove waste fast and invisibly were not in place. There were still underground drains, but they ended up in

the backyard. Bodily waste in its most immediate and hazardous form remained hidden, but once it was subject to transformation into compost it was present; the worm farm occupied a significant space in the backyard. It was enclosed in an attractive box, it didn't smell, but its reality could not be denied. This household couldn't help but acknowledge waste, not in its brute physicality but as a fact of their daily lives, as something that required attention. You couldn't sustain an ethos of distance and denial in this house because its structural organization presumes a careful and ethical coexistence with waste.

All the quotidian rituals of caring for the worm farm, keeping it functioning efficiently, have impacts on bodies. They require new habits, different corporeal disciplines, and these reverberate across other registers of the self. It is hard for bodily waste to sustain the same level of symbolic force as abject horrifying matter when its management, once it leaves your body, remains your responsibility. Instead, one has to become realistic about it, give it a certain quality of attention. The dynamics of repression are diminished in this new relation with bodily waste. As I've argued elsewhere, different technologies of waste management show how habits and symbolic systems intersect and how these points of intersection can transform affects and micropolitics.¹⁴ Here was a family that had experimented with a different way of living with their waste. This didn't involve messiness or unboundedness, the collapse of all boundaries, or the collapse of a notion of waste. Rather, it involved different technical systems, bodily performances, calculations of value, and the relations between these. Waste in this house wasn't disgusting or abhorrent. It was in transition, in between contaminating and productive. And facilitating that transition involved two crucial things: lots and lots of worms and simple attentiveness. Through these two things a sustainable ethics of waste emerged.

Changes in one house or even hundreds won't save the planet. This is a common criticism of the sustainable house and other strategies that focus on individuals or families taking a stand and radically changing their daily practices. In fact, these strategies have sometimes been interpreted as the privatization of public problems. This is not my position. I would challenge it by arguing that the adoption of strategies at the micropolitical level of the home and the body reverberates across larger political culture in a multiplicity of ways. When the sustainable house is featured on a national lifestyle show, when people who have been on a tour of it talk to friends, when Internet sites

showcase it, it impacts on new constituencies. Micropolitics shape an intersubjective ethos of politics. This intersubjective ethos occurs in conversations, in the media, in myriad relations in which practical examples of different ways of managing waste undermine normalized and exploitative practices and nurture receptivity to change.

But what about structural solutions? What about sustainable human waste management on a large scale? In Granville Township in Pennsylvania the Sewer and Water Department decided in 2004 to solve its serious biowaste problem by signing a contract for a full-scale vermicomposting system, the first to be constructed in the United States. The existing sewer system used an aerobic sludge digestion facility that involved intermittent discharge into a river and the transfer of dewatered biosolids, or what was left over, to a landfill. This landfill was rapidly reaching capacity, and so an alternative solution to the problem of biosolid waste was required. Four vermiculture beds six feet wide and ninety-five feet long housing one thousand pounds of worms per bed were the solution.¹⁵ This large-scale use of worms to manage a town's biosolids does not have any impact on householders; it makes no claims on them, and it won't change their habits. But it does show an important shift at the macropolitical level of local systems of governmentality. It shows a willingness to embrace a more sustainable technology, and whether this was done for cost-saving reasons or environmental concerns is irrelevant. The fact is that worms are being productively used to facilitate the arts of transience on a mass scale where once dumping was the solution.

The images used to promote the Granville project show the giant worm farms housed in a shed. There is lots of engineering in evidence: conveyor belts to move and spread the mix, trays and another conveyor system to collect the castings, which are then stabilized and sold as agricultural fertilizer. This is a potent example of how nature is always differentially mixed into culture. All this technology doesn't diminish the great significance of the work being done by those worms as they facilitate transition. In those giant industrial worm farms heightened life and heightened death go together; the profound interconnections between destruction and renewal are everywhere evident. Perhaps this system exemplifies what Phillips calls "the ordinary sublime." He uses this term to explain the difficulties Darwin had accounting for experiences of things that overwhelm and overawe us once God drops out of the picture.

It is the immediate (in the literal sense) participation of nature in the experience of men and women that Darwin is promoting. But it is the ordinary sublime of transience that he singles out; there is nothing more ordinary, more natural, than that we should have experiences that no one, not even God, understands: experiences that satisfy us because they overwhelm us, experiences we value because they are strange.¹⁶

The ordinary sublime of transience is what worms show us. To witness worms at work, whether on a big or small scale, is to encounter the philosophical resonance of biological processes. Worms are the penultimate loss managers, and they give us a powerful example of how quotidian and inevitable change is. And in this very ordinariness we can see how loss and change can be experienced without denial or disgust or despair, and without recourse to grand moral rhetoric. We can see how waste can contribute to renewal, how it can be generative.

I've argued that current waste habits protect us from encountering change. Their predictability and comfort is predicated on technologies of streamlined removal that allow us to avoid the transition that wasted things will inevitably undergo. Most acts of disposal involve relations with technology or containers, not the waste itself. We experience elimination and removal but not decay and change. Managing a worm farm disrupts this. When you live with worms you enter into a different means of engagement with waste: your bodily and kitchen by-products become their food, their waste becomes your garden fertilizer. You have to live with your waste a little more carefully so as to facilitate its effective transition by worms, and in these habits a calmer acceptance of your own transience might be nurtured.

Worms are good for seeing the links between philosophy and biology. They make a politics of active experimentation easy. It's simple to nurture the generative possibilities of waste when you can harness the generosity of worms; they encourage an ethic of sustainability by default. But worms don't eat broken fridges, or outmoded computers or mountains of plastic drink bottles. Being on the side of life means that they facilitate transition as a form of productive return. They are no help in confronting the destructive reality of waste on a mass scale, whereby dumped dead objects sink into an endless afterlife. Worms

cannot deal with the ecological consequences of commodity cultures—the accumulation of wasted things and the toxicity and ruins such cultures create. The exploitation of human and environmental resources in the name of “progress” reveals a will to destruction that defiles both life and death.¹⁷ The will to destruction inhibits the generative possibilities of death and loss that worms exemplify with such force.

In shifting now to an analysis of waste as destructive, my aim is not to find examples of active experimentation but to understand how commodity relations actually inhibit the development of these minor practices. The logics of commodity cultures make the arts of transience difficult to enact in relation to nonputrescible waste. This is because the short life of the commodity defines transience not as renewal but as endless disappearance and replacement. And it is this slight but significant distinction that signals how commodity cultures produce particular experiences of time, loss, and the past. An ethos of consumption teaches us how to make a fetish of the new, how to live with constant change, and how to adapt to the temporality of serial replacement and disposability. When the ever new is ever the same, transience is experienced not as cyclical repetition in the interest of regeneration but as “extreme temporal attenuation.”¹⁸ And it is this phenomenological experience of consumption as turnover and repetition that blinds us to the will to destruction that underwrites it.

Walter Benjamin offers one of the most important analyses of transience and destruction in commodity cultures. In several key texts he speculates on how the rise of commodity culture has displaced nature's transitoriness onto commodities. Susan Buck-Morss reads this work with insight.¹⁹ Her account of Benjamin's thinking on fashion traces how he sees the reified commodity as a kind of reversal of biology; the living human potential for change becomes alienated and appears instead as a quality of inorganic objects. The cult of the new and the worship of youth are fundamental to the modern commodity, and one effect of this is the denial of organic change. As Benjamin says of modernity: “This time doesn't want to know death. . . . Fashion mocks death.”²⁰ In commodity cultures the creativity and transiency of nature, which are a source of life, become seriality and the cult of the new, which deny the fact of death at the same time as they fuel destruction.

Benjamin is fascinated with the other side of commodification: the mortification of matter that is no longer fashionable. He sees in rubbish the death

mask of the commodity, and he shows how these abandoned everyday things could be used to think with. Unlike so many contemporary theorists of material culture Benjamin takes the debris of mass culture seriously. He sees it as a source of both concrete historical referents and philosophical insight.²¹ He is interested in how to figure the destructiveness of commodity culture, not so much in terms of economic exploitation, but in terms of how the magical value and fetish value of commodities are experienced and extinguished. Like Phillips, Benjamin makes a case for destruction as a condition of possibility for the experience of life and philosophical truth. He is interested in the creative potential of change, the ways in which destruction can produce new relations to things and new insights. The destruction of the aura of the artwork through mechanical reproduction, for example, opened up the possibility of changed relations with the image and the chance to perceive ordinary things in radically new ways.²²

But the rise of modernity and commodity culture was also catastrophic. The destruction of cities in the name of modernization obliterated the past and revealed the fragility of things that seemed permanent. The industrial system alienated people from the realities of production and turned things into reified objects of desire. The rise of the fashion system and the novelty of the new accelerated obsolescence shortened the life of things. Modernity's "progress" was continual change as eternal recurrence. Buck-Morss describes Benjamin's thoughts on catastrophe in the Passagen-Werk like this: "Transiency without progress, a relentless pursuit of 'novelty' that brings nothing new in history—in making visible the outlines of this temporality, Benjamin provides the direct counterimage to an approaching heaven-on-earth."²³

If consumer culture was not heaven on earth as promised, if it trapped people in the "deadly repetitiveness of time," or a perpetual now, how could its catastrophic effects be challenged?²⁴ What kinds of political practice might overcome this? How might a concept of the new as radical dislocation disrupt the relentless continuity of transiency without progress? In pursuing these questions Benjamin draws on diverse sources from Marxist historiography to surrealism. I cannot do justice to his thinking on the nature of politics and historical experience here.²⁵ My concern is with what he thought about the specific role of commodities in recasting social order. And in addressing this question wasted and decaying things, the detritus and debris of commodity culture, are of singular importance.

Benjamin's explanations of how commodities might confront and challenge us range from the apocalyptic to the everyday. His famous image of the Angel of History facing the past as wreckage, "while the pile of debris before him grows skyward," has been extensively analyzed.²⁶ It prefigures not just a radical philosophy of history but, also, as Paul Magee suggests, an environmentalist discourse on waste: "The Angel shows such a subject his or her barbarism in the 'pile of debris' that is the present continuous tense of the everyday."²⁷

But the small examples are more suggestive for thinking about the changes that might happen when subjects encounter discarded things. Benjamin's thoughts on surrealist bricolage in "Dream Kitsch" trace the energy surrealism was able to invest in everyday debris. And he shows how these avant-garde practices disrupted perception and gave ordinary things a compelling power over humans.²⁸ His account of avant-garde practices concurs with Connolly's definition of micropolitics. Benjamin is aware of the political possibilities of small changes in perception and experience, of what might happen when familiar things are seen differently. He recognizes the political possibilities of shock and wonder, the ways in which these affects can be the source of minor transformations.

In his essay on surrealism he examines how confrontations with wasted things can crystallize the dynamics of commodity value. Bill Brown summarizes the key argument of this essay like this: "Benjamin recognised that the gap between the function of objects and the desires congealed there became clear only when those objects became outmoded."²⁹ Wasted things can make us suddenly aware of the vagaries of desire; they can let us see the material substance out of which commodities emerge. But is this enough to change the destructive logic of commodification, to make us aware of the impacts of disposability as transiency without renewal? Who can say? All that can be argued is that these moments engage us in different relations with commodities that could be a source of more self-conscious material practices.

Benjamin wants a new materialism, and he sees evidence of it at work in how children play with wasted things. He interprets these games and inventions not in psychological terms but as political and historical examples of how another materiality could be created. Again I am drawn to Brown's analysis because it captures so beautifully Benjamin's hope in imagining a different way of living with things:

One must imagine that within the child's "tactile tryst" the substantiality of things emerges for the first time, and that this is the condition for reshaping the material world we inhabit. One must imagine that this experience in the everyday foretells a different human existence. If the use value of an object amounts to its preconceived utility, then its misuse value should be understood as the unforeseeable potential within the object, part of an uncompleted dream.³⁰

Children's play with waste and other things is an example of active experimentation because it involves a process of creating new meanings and relations. It parallels the practices of gleaning and making do that I explore in chapter 4. All these activities show how waste can provoke new uses and engagements. In play and misuse value, as Brown calls it, another materiality is created. Benjamin reads this as politically salient; in the child's world he sees the radical possibilities of different ways of being with things. This different way of being involves a more immediate appreciation of the qualitative and substantial reality of the thing. It is less mediated and reified; it is about use value, not exchange value. And this is its implicit challenge to commodity relations and the alienation and abstraction that they generate.

There is, however, a danger in this opposition between direct appreciation of material things and alienated consumption of commodities. It can too easily fuel a disenchantment narrative about commodity relations as essentially bad. While I completely accept environmentalism's critiques of the destructive impacts of commodification, one of my aims in this book is to think about the other effects and possibilities of commodity relations. I have taken my lead from Jane Bennett, whose phenomenology of consumption emphasizes the ambiguities of commodity relations, the unpredictable and disturbing effects they can generate, and the political experiments they might provoke.³¹

Like Benjamin, Bennett does not dismiss commodities' capacity to enchant as mere manipulation. Their fetish and magical qualities might be precisely where new affects and relations could surface. Benjamin sees the wasted fragments and debris of modern urban life as one site where the contingency and fragility of commodity value is exposed. Bennett sees advertisements as a site where the animation of things can remind us of the liveliness of matter. Both these thinkers accept and explore with insight the deadening and destructive effects of consumption. Commodity cultures create ruins at the same time as they make us blind to this. But, Benjamin and Bennett argue, commodities

can also engage us with their material and magical qualities; offer us pleasure and real sensual delights. These experiences remind us of how commodities make claims on us beyond the immediacy of desire and purchase. In fitting them into our lives we have to figure out how to possess them in more than economic terms. The attachments and affects we create in our everyday habits with things challenge accounts of consumers as dulled and stupefied; they reveal a complexity in material relations that cannot be reduced to the cultural logic of capitalism.

And this complexity surfaces in the experiences we can have of objects that somehow challenge the ethos of disposability and denial. The very act of attention, of noticing what we so often don't see, captures us in different relations with objects that can become new networks of obligation. This book explores some of the affects and calculations that can emerge in these networks and energize a different ethics of waste. Feeling moved by a dancing plastic bag, feeling disgusted by an ocean streaked with human waste, feeling surprised by the wondrous beauty of a dumped potato, feeling good about recycling—these various affects and responses reverberate through the body, disrupting careless habits and inviting us to reflect on how our selfhood is caught up with waste.

Over the last thirty years waste has been problematized. These various problematizations have informed governmental programs on waste reduction and householder education. They have led to a range of moral codes about how we should be around our waste. These codes have been enfolded with new domestic habits and new circuits of guilt and conscience about waste. The changes in behavior that have resulted from these new codes and disciplines have led to different waste management practices that have no doubt made a difference. But moral codes are pretty crude instruments for change, they can breed resentment and they can involve unthinking obedience to rules. They can also identify very restricted sources as the motivation for moral actions. In the case of waste this has most often been nature in crisis. However, in the appeal to save the earth, to make a gesture to the planet, our complex interconnections with waste are often denied or displaced.

This book has explored what happens when waste rather than nature is the motivation for new actions. This has led to a focus on ethics as relations of self-cultivation rather than on morality as categorical imperatives. It has also led to an investigation of how we live with waste; its place in techniques of the self; how it is implicated in embodiment, habits, and the material everyday;

and how it can unsettle our confidence and mastery. In many of the situations surveyed here waste isn't a phobic object. It's part of a relation in which we sense our interdependence with what we discard and feel the force of time and transience. The singularity of these encounters, or "waste relations," makes prescriptive definitions of a "proper" ethics of waste impossible. There are many different ways in which the ethos of disposability, distance, and denial can be challenged, many different ways in which our waste micropractices could be transformed. But for this to happen, for a less destructive ethics of waste to emerge, awareness of the arts of transience is crucial. Whatever form this takes, cultivating a careful and generous attention to loss is a good way to start.