THE ETHICS OF WASTE

By Gay Hawkins

Paper Presented at The Institute of Humanities, University of Michigan November 2000

2001-08-16 | I’m going to begin my paper with some reflections on an image of rubbish. Hopefully, an image many of you may be familiar with. It’s the plastic bag scene from American Beauty: an extended video image of a plastic bag blowing around, dancing in the wind. The scene begins with the words ‘would you like to see the most beautiful thing in the world?’

I’m going to begin my paper with some reflections on an image of rubbish. Hopefully, an image many of you may be familiar with. It’s the plastic bag scene from American Beauty: an extended video image of a plastic bag blowing around, dancing in the wind. The scene begins with the words ‘would you like to see the most beautiful thing in the world?’

Watching this scene for the first time I was overcome by a wholly unexpected sadness. Not the sort of sadness and disappointment you feel noticing all the plastic bags washed up on the shore of an isolated, unsettled beach - which is a form of mourning purity - rather, I felt sadness for the bag.

Everyone I have spoken to about this film remembers this scene but they generally don’t describe it as ‘sad’; beautiful, yes, moving and profound, no. Yet for me this scene was haunted. As alive as the bag was, as lyrical as its dance with the wind was, it was still a plastic bag. It could not entirely escape its materiality or its semiotics. The bag seemed to carry the whole enormous weight of ecological crisis. The lightness of the bag, the emptiness of the bag, was in contrast with its burden as the penultimate sign of environmental catastrophe: a world drowning in plastic bags. A world in which we are constantly instructed to ‘say NO to plastic bags!’ In this scene the aesthetic resonances could not completely override the moral undertones. The bag was rendered beautiful but this didn’t make it good.

I have no doubt that my response was partially an effect of being rendered ‘environmentally aware’; all those years of public campaigns instructing me to resist the easy convenience of plastic bags, to do my bit for nature. This training does not mean that I have eliminated plastic bags from my life, far from it, but it has meant that my relations with them have become more complicated. Perhaps this is why the redemptive gesture that structures this rubbish scene was so troubling. For redemption here meant the absolutely worthless and trivial transformed into the absolutely beautiful; redemption without any concern for moral or ecological consequences. I am simply too ambivalent about plastic bags for this transformation to be completely successful. For me the bag signified much more than the beauty of ephemera, it signified a major environmental problem rendered sensuous and enchanted.

This scene invited me to change my affective relations with plastic bags, to delight in something I have been trained to hate. I think this could be why I found it so deeply unsettling. I think this could be why I felt sympathy for the bag.

Now unlike American Beauty most environmental education allows for no ambiguity about the status of plastic bags. They are unequivocally bad, matter out of place, contaminating the purity of the natural with their sticky persistence. There is only one response to them, disgust. Bags are straightforward objects of moral condemnation, objects that provoke judgement and guilt. (eg of ‘The EPA’s Drain is Just for Rain’ campaign which shows how the desire for environmental purity cannot be separated from the desire for moral stability).

It’s not often that we experience rubbish as beautiful, and I am sure some would find American Beauty’s aestheticisation of a major environmental problem grotesque. Yet, in this cinematic moment, the deliberative and prescriptive logic of much environmental education is profoundly disturbed. For the rubbish scene alludes to different ways of living with bags: to our various uses and experiences of them. It locates plastic bags in the realm of the sensual and the affective and it refuses the essentialising move in much moral judgement that renders rubbish always already bad, thereby denying paradox and ambiguity, let alone recognition of our shifting relational sensibilities with it.

My point is not to defend plastic bags, to make a plea for a much maligned object. Simply, to acknowledge the variety of relations we have with them in order to show that their status as rubbish is not fixed. That may be one of their identities but it’s not the only one. And it is this very ambiguity and complexity of uses that complicates moral rulings and condemnations about bags as bad. That signals the tensions between morality as a set of commands and doctrines and ethics as a set of practical tactics and cultivations that afford opportunities for reflective modification of the self. In our everyday life with plastic bags their movement through different categories, from useful container to rubbish, generates different attitudes and modes of relating. This is the stuff of ethics – not objects or practices classified as good or bad but relations of thinking, feeling, acting, becoming.

Feeling sympathy for the plastic bag, feeling disgust for the plastic bag, such different experiences of the bag, such different problematisations of our relations with them. Despite the differences in these visceral intensities both remind us that we cannot avoid relating to rubbish: moved, repulsed, either way we’re implicated. But exactly how is waste implicated in our experience and enactment of the ethical? How has putting out the garbage become an ethical experience? What selves do our relations with waste produce? How do we manage the fact of continuous change, transience and decay in our lives? Could it possibly be more ‘environmentally friendly’ to feel ethical concern for rubbish rather than that abstract space called ‘nature’?

These are the questions driving this paper and the bigger project. My intention is to open up other ways of thinking about the social regulation of our relations with waste beyond command moralities: don’t litter, refuse plastic bags, reuse and recycle. For as much as we may agree with such interdictions and recognize their rationality and correctness, cultivating such practices in our daily lives involves complex relations with both waste and our multilayered subjectivity. And it is this very complexity that forces us to confront not only the ubiquity of ethical work but also its imbrication with the corporeal, its fundamental engagement with the most visceral registers of being (Connolly, 1999: 3).

I’ve structured this paper around three aspects of our waste relations. First, the relationship between disposal and loss; then the problem of two different but related attitudes that often possess us putting out the garbage: righteousness and resentment. And finally what I call ‘the arts of transience’: or those ways of being with waste that reveal the relation between ethics and a politics of becoming. Ultimately I am interested in what a different, less moralistic ethics, of waste might look like.

Disposal and Loss

We need to get rid of things. I am simply not of the school of environmental fundamentalism that says there should be no such category as waste. Waste is something we all have to manage. Beyond biological necessity we dispose and discard in the interests of ordering the self, in the interests of maintaining a boundary between what is connected to the self and what isn’t. Waste management in all its various forms and historical mutations is not only fundamental to the practice of subjectivity it is also one of our most quotidian experiences of loss and disappearance. Disposing, then, is a very particular form of loss, one that is bound up with a whole host of practices through which we cultivate particular sensibilities and sensual relations with the world. Styles of garbage elimination can be located within Foucault’s (1990) ‘arts of existence’: all those actions and rules of conduct through which we transform ourselves and our lives according to particular aesthetic and ethical criteria.

If styles of garbage elimination are also styles of self how have techniques of disposal been problematised? And how do these problematisations shape our rubbish relations and constitute very particular meanings for loss? To consider these questions we need to examine the ethos of disposability, we need to think about those objects marketed on the basis of their disposability. And we’re talking about more than nappies, plastic bags or polystyrene cups here, we’re talking about the fundamental logic of the commodity form, seriality. Mass production of objects and their consumption depends on widespread acceptance of, even pleasure in, exchangeability; replacing the old, the broken, the out of fashion with the new. The capacity for serial replacement is also the capacity to throw away without concern: disposal as disavowal.

In her history of rubbish, Waste and Want (1999), Susan Strasser challenges the assumption that the ethos of disposability is simply emblematic of fifties consumerism (1999: 266). For her, efficiency, cleanliness and relaceability have been a significant part of modernist culture since the days of paper collars in the 1860s. Post World War II expansions in manufacturing and consumerism merely enhanced already existing relations to some objects in which the desire for possession or convenience subsumed any concern for what became of things once they were used up or classified as no longer of value. However, while disposal may be the ultimate destiny of objects valued for their convenience or for their commodity status the logic of this disposability is a product of quite different processes of value formation and decline.

The object marketed for its convenience evokes a modernist asceticism and temporality in which the technical is valorized for not only saving time but also for its instrumental rationality. Many convenient objects have a presence as imminent rubbish that is impossible to suppress. Plastic, paper, polystyrene discourage sensual attachments, their use in the making of transient objects signifies a very finite value, a value waiting to be used up (hence their classification as single use objects). Commodities, on the other hand, may well be convenient and efficient but they are also much more. Their fetish qualities conceal the socially constructed nature of their value and animate them with autonomy and magic. Because we generally have no idea how commodities come into being their life after we’ve finished with them is also of little or no interest. The magical qualities of the commodity can obliterate their origins and their final destination. Often this destination may not be landfill, things can move out of commodity status without becoming rubbish, as Appadurai reminds us in his account of the social life of things. 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 logic of seriality: just get another one.

My argument here is that the different logics of convenience and commodification have reconstituted subject/object relations in ways that make the capacity to dispose without concern possible. These logics depend on the idea of loss as absolute disappearance, loss without return, loss as a necessary component of desire, purity and the pleasure of the new. Strasser is right in arguing that these new relations to things, this particular capacity to lose, had to be acquired. But she is somewhat glib and nostalgic in reading this development as symptomatic of a ‘way of life remote from hand production’ (1999: 265). For the kind of self imagined in disposability is not simply a self alienated from production, it is a self who regards rubbish as ethically insignificant, a self who does not experience putting out the garbage as an ethical encounter, a self who does not attach moral weight to this scene of loss.

This doesn’t mean that disposability isn’t problematised rather, that the terms of this problematisation do not involve reflective modification of the self. Disposability constitutes waste as a technical problem, something to be administered by the most efficient and rational technologies of removal. Generally this means dumping; the bin, the local landfill 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 landfill or stared down a drain (or read Underworld) would know, disposability as disavowal is a technical and psychic fantasy. This experience of abjection, of the intimacy of the uncontrollable reveals that these are not places where matter is out of place so much as sites where we feel the ghost or shadow of a stable subjectivity. Sites where our nausea, our visceral registers reveal the different and excessive qualities or ourself, the parts of our self that include the refuse we want to deny. In these contexts the ethos of disposability has to work hard to maintain a relation of mastery of waste, of absolute separation between self and rubbish.

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, that a different problematisation of waste has emerged over the last thirty years that has made trouble for the idea of careless separation; the technical has become implicated in the moral. This shift has depended on invocations of contamination and its implications for the social body. 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, so too was urban order. The rise of anti litter campaigns in the late sixties represented rubbish as not merely matter out of place but as morally unsettling, evidence of the collapse of civic obligation. (cf Johnny Rotten’s description of the rise of the Sex Pistols in The Filth and the Fury ‘the band got together during the garbage strike in 197?, London was filthy’) More crucial, however, was the way these campaigns linked the individual body to the social body. A favoured image in anti litter campaigns was (and still is) the disembodied hand in the act of dropping rubbish. This scene of loss was no longer a sign of individual purification but of pollution, evidence of an undisciplined self unable to regulate its actions in the interests of social and environmental order. Thoughtless disposal was given moral content, it was now implicated in, even responsible for, environmental and social decline.

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 normalisation 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 historical and personal conducts around disposing have been subjected to questioning, how they have been made the target of moral reflection, how everyday routines and habits are implicated in particular sorts of subjectivity. And we can also see how the shift from disposal to management has depended on the process of problematising and redeeming loss in the same moment, converting it into an act of good.

The success of ‘management’ as the new political rationality of waste policy is evidence of disciplinary individualism, of changed rubbish practices that are both voluntary and coercive (Cruikshank, 1999: 3). These practices signal the impacts of domestic waste education and the ways it is enfolded with a new conscience about rubbish. And it is this conscience that is a significant element of our moral attachment to recycling. This willingness to voluntarily change rubbish practices and make the self ‘environmentally aware’ reveals the play of power in subjectivity. There is no question that the demand to manage waste has come from macropolitical programs and structural transformations in domestic waste services that are coercive but the success of these changes, in terms of widespread participation across populations, has depended on changes in micro levels of everyday life, on the ways we’ve willingly acted on ourselves. This is the terrain of the government/subjectivity relation where relations to oneself become implicated in agencies of power-knowledge. Where, according to Deleuze, 'the individual is coded or redcoded within a "moral" knowledge, and above all (he) becomes the stake in a power struggle' (Deleuze, 1995: 103). This is the point when power in the form of control and dependence becomes implicated in daily life and interiority, when subjects become tied to an identity by various techniques of moral self knowledge (Deleuze, 1995).

Now, as useful as accounts of the governmentalisation of waste are for understanding the role of introspective moral problematisation in changing techniques of the self they are also seriously limited. The governmentality thesis too often presumes a neat alignment between subjectivity and subjection. Personhood is flattened out into a series of techniques, into an almost Pavlovian structure of selfhood, a self ‘trained’ into being.

The emphasis on conscience and other code driven moral techniques displaces attention from the question of how new identities and ethical attachments might emerge out of the unexpected energies and disturbances that unsettle being.

And when we look at examples and experiences of ‘waste management’ we can see how these disturbances are suppressed. How the moral weight of codes and conscience works to deny the ambiguous, contradictory and unsettling aspects of many of our encounters with waste. How the moral recasting of disposal depends on making obligation and guilt serve the interests of mastery and self-certainty and excludes the visceral, the guttural and the situational. Moral problematisation may have changed our relations with rubbish but it has not necessarily changed our relations to loss or our desire for purity. And we can see all this at work in the case of recycling, a very particular scene of loss

Righteousness and Resentment

I now want to consider two examples, a waste education leaflet and a letter to the editor about ‘hating recycling’, in order to show both the limits of the governmentality approach and, more importantly, why moral problematisation of disposal does not necessarily produce new rubbish relations. One of these examples is infused with righteousness, the other, resentment, two attitudes that I think seriously inhibit the possibility of a different ethics of waste.

Good Sort OHP

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 (bottles here, papers there), 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 micro practices 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. Sorting waste means regulating and disciplining our practices in order to render the self more congruent with particular ethical values: 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’; economy, ‘all our waste management centers take recyclable materials for free so save yourself and your community a load of cash.’ (‘Are You a Good Sort?’ leaflet, NSW Waste Service, nd)

The Good Sort campaign shows how processes of self-regulation and discipline shape our relations with waste and how circuits of guilt, self-reproach and virtue have become enfolded with our intimate acts of disposing. The problem is that this rubbish relation denies other ways of being with waste. Waste habits are represented as flat, static, mechanical, easily altered with appeals to reason and good sense. There is no room for disgust or horror or pleasure or resentment, no room for movement between different registers of subjectivity, no room for the any recognition of how changes in practices of the self may effect ethical sensibilities. This type of moral instruction forecloses any possibility of understanding shifting forms of being in our relations with waste. Relation here means mastery and control. We may be being more careful and attentive with our waste but it is still absolutely and unquestionably separate from the self, something to be got rid of. Recycling, then, could be described as virtue added disposal. While it infuses new rubbish techniques with righteousness; while it qualifies the loss of chucking away with a sense that this rubbish is entering a liminal zone between waste and new commodity, it's still disposal. It's disposal in which the self is morally purified, loss redeemed.

What remains 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 protesting about recycling captures this tension beautifully:

Letter OHP

There is no doubt that this writer hates recycling; stuff ‘noble ideals’, its 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, judgement 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 our most immediate other and establishing our difference and separation from it the condition of possibility for a self, then its persistence, its refusal to go, its visibility, is a primordial threat to the drive for wholeness. The self exists only in relation but rubbish practices based on expulsion, disposal and elimination maintain the fantasy of separation and sovereignty. Recycling disrupts this. Not only do we have to handle our waste much more but 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 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, abjection and the visceral in this response to recycling reveal the heterodox nature of ethics and their relative autonomy. This letter describes an experience of ethical discontent that emerges from a waste ethos constituted around aesthetic rather than environmental values. For this author the disciplines that recycling demands harbour no opportunities for artistic practice, in fact they disrupt the relation between order and beauty, aesthetics and ethics that are fundamental to his arts of existence. 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 governmental restraints.

The Arts of Transience

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? How could we establish a different relationship to this necessary loss? Domestic waste education seeks to order bodies and affects around waste in certain ways but this plane of molar political organization, as Deleuze calls it, exists in a relationship of tension and negotiation with other planes and dimensions of being. Deleuze’s insistence on the plurivocity of being, on the multiplicity of dimensions, lines, directions, signals how movements of becoming and immanence fragment the normative work of the plane of organization. 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 enfolding of the outside, folds incorporate without totalizing, internalize without unifying, they make spaces, surfaces, flows, layers. ‘Subjectivation is created by folding’ by bending the outside through practical exercises (Deleuze, 1995: 104). 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 where the relation to oneself resists being codified by agencies of power-knowledge, ‘the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise’ (1995: 104). 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 implicated in modes of obligation and duty to various forms of authority.

Deleuze’s account of enfolding has been taken up by theorists of governmentality. (see eg Dean and Rose) Yet, as useful as this work is for thinking about rule as a form of enfolding, 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’ (Deleuze, 1995: 104) constitutes us as governable subjects. What they are less able to see are those forces of ethical life and being, those encounters, visceral movements, differences that initiate other possibilities for subjectivity and intersubjectivity, what William Connolly (1999) calls the ‘movements of becoming’.

Unlike the governmentality theorists, the concern in Connolly’s work is not how are codes of morality and normativity enfolded with particular habits of being rather, how does being operate in a paradoxical relation of tension and interdependence with the movements of becoming? (1999: 195) In Connolly’s argument 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, disturbing and contradictory aspects of most ethical encounters. The moral weight of codes and doctrines turns responsibility and 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 form of obligation undermines senses of ethical connection, implication, becoming, in order to maintain self-certainty and suppress other registers of being.

Yet in the new experiences of obligation to our rubbish that recycling and composting have initiated the visceral and the guttural are ever present, 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, is in a state of irretrievable decay. We see the end of mastery, we see becoming (Connolly, 1999: 49). 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 verge after pick up gives you a shudder of aversion way beyond mere irritation. Why is that such a disturbing sight? These moments of intensity, excess, affect, 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 difference within the self, in the self’s relation to otherness, that we can locate a politics of becoming.

Responsiveness resonates with Deleuze’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’ (Delueze and Guattari 1988: 256-57). For Connolly responsiveness is a condition of possibility, it opens up lines of mobility and difference within the self, it is something to be cultivated. An ‘ethos of critical responsiveness’ (Connolly, 1999: 62) 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.

What 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 problematisation of waste has established new relations of obligation and duty with our rubbish, 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 showed. In other words, domestic waste education privileges a fairly restricted set of responses and these are inextricably linked to the logic of moral codification that too easily slides into moralism.

Righteousness, resentment and guilt are not politically productive, sure they may have mobilised most people to recycle, they may underpin many people’s moral attachment to recycling but they inhibit other possibilities, other ways of being with waste, other responses. 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 denies the tension between being and becoming. It secures an obligation to new techniques and habits by insisting that the threat of waste be mastered: reduced, reused, recycled. It maintains an absolute alterity of waste and blinds us to an awareness 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 those 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 gratitude; that we could cultivate a different experience of loss.

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’.

As we know composting and worm farms involve a quite different set of waste relations from putting out the garbage or recycling. For a start we are dealing with putrescible waste, things that rot and decompose, and we generally don’t throw this away we manage it at home, carefully. And it is precisely this process of care that allows us to see not only the relation between destruction and conservation but also how we might engage ethically with loss and transience (Phillips, 1999).

In his reading of Darwin’s account of earthworms, Adam Phillips finds a description of an exemplary moral universe. Phillips argues that Darwin found worms, for so long considered the bottom of the hierarchy, to be sophisticated and heroic labourers. Their constant work digesting shows us another sort of loss, a loss that is not destructive, that is not driven by the desire for purity, but is rather, transformative, a loss that is also at the same time renewal. In praising the inexhaustible work that makes the earth fertile Darwin celebrated the resilience and inventiveness of nature, he replaced a Christian creation myth with a secular maintenance myth (Phillips, 1999: 56). What Darwin finds in worms, according to Phillips, is a moral universe predicated on collaborative generosity. Worm’s digestion is not a form of altruism it is gratuitously virtuous and it shows us the paradoxical interconnections between destruction and renewal. Composting and worm farms, then, can be considered as waste practices attentive to the arts of transience rather than disposal. They afford ways of managing loss that involves not disavowal but care, mindfulness and generosity; a sympathy for waste.

The ‘Enjoy Your Garbage’ campaign was more ambiguous. It involved putting that slogan on garbage trucks, all education materials to households and a series of radio ads with that punchline. But behind all this was a pretty standard set of prescriptions about reducing, recycling, composting. Enjoyment was to be found in the doing the right thing, in self-discipline. Still, there is something unsettling and suggestive about the interdiction to enjoy. Is this the pleasure of being virtuous or of care and deliberation, of a cultivated pleasure in living with rather than without rubbish? Who can say but at least enjoyment presumes other responses and ways of being with waste beyond moral duty, at least it acknowledges the possibility of a waste ethics that is creative, experimental, pleasurable.

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 recognise 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 righteousness. Fundamental to all these alternative approaches is a recognition of how often our experiences of waste remind us of the constitutive fragility of ethics, of how loss that isn’t denied or disavowed can be the organizing principle of life.

There is no doubt that the environment, ‘nature’ is suffering due to the burden of our excessive waste; that our sense of mastery over nature emerges, in part, from our capacity to dump waste on it. As Serres (1995) says, one of the ways in which we master and possess nature is by fouling it. But in seeking to change this, politics driven by the logics of moral imperatives and disciplinary individualism can only go 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. To be moved by waste, to be disturbed by it, is to be open to our own becoming. It is to be able to cultivate a care and sensibility for it that is also at the same time a cultivation of the arts of transience.

References

Calvino, Italo (1993) ‘La Poubelle Agreee’ in The Road to San Giovanni London: Jonathon Cape.

Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Cruikshank, Barbara (1999) The Will to Empower Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Foucault Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (1988) a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia London: The Athlone Press.

Foucault, Michel (1990) The Use of Pleasure New York: Vintage Books.

Phillips, Adam (1999) Darwin’s Worms London: Faber and Faber.

Serres, Michel (1995) The Natural Contract Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Strasser, Susan (1999) Waste and Want New York: Metropolitan Books.

Bibliographic Details

Gay Hawkins is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communications, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She writes on governmentality and media policy, poststructuralist theory and rubbish relations. In 1993 she published From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts (Allen and Unwin). She is currently writing a book on the ethics of waste.