Love Your Garbage! Beyond the useful-useless dichotomy

How do objects become unwanted, valueless, useless? How have things become so easily disposable? These questions play a central role in most theories of trash, garbage and waste. Garbage has among others been theorized as 'matter out of place' (Mary Douglas) and more recently as 'matter out of time' (William Viney). In my paper I will focus on the latter definition of garbage.

Waste is every object, plus time, writes Brian Thill in Waste. The moment we stop desiring objects, they become waste. But what we forget, is that things don't disappear as soon as we are done with them. As Greg Kennedy points out in making waste we deny both the physicality of things and our own finitude. We use disposable items, minimizing care, saving time. But of course these items don't go away. Waste lingers. Waste remains. This is what Viney calls 'waste-time' - things linger beyond their time of use. We act as if things are inert until they come to human consciousness, writes Viney. And, I would ad, we act as if they become inert after we are done with them.

But of course they don't. We should therefore go beyond the useful-useless dichotomy and take the agency of objects (Bill Brown, Bruno Latour) and the vitality of matter (Jane Bennett) into account. I propose that we need to love our garbage. As Slavoj Zizek points out in the short documentary Examined Life we need to start feeling at home in trash heaps and also learn to love them. Without idealizing them of course – waste is not (always) food. Garbage isn't going anywhere and we should therefore take this relationship seriously. I will suggest Timothy Morton's notions of 'hyperobject' and 'dark ecology' can help us grapple with this relationship.