Class, for this week, please generate three meaty discussion questions and post them in the comments of this post. Try to generate one discussion question for each article (Reno, Gidwani, Waldrop). To make the question more substantial, begin it with a claim or quote from the essay in question. (If quoting, cite the page number using MLA style.)
MALS70000: Waste Matters: Economy, Ecology, and Cultures of Garbage
Just another CUNY Academic Commons site
In Joshua Reno’s Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: the Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfil
George went on to tell me about his attempt to avoid the stigma of his job by cultivating a middle class lifestyle: ‘People probably see my house and don’t realize who lives there. That’s why I like to have nice things, that’s why my wife and I like to live next to upper class people: just ‘cause I work at a dump doesn’t mean I’m a dump! There have been times i have found pieces of furniture in my garbage room that look great and are in good condition but I can never bring myself to take them because they were in the trash, Does this apply to you? Do you feel that when/ if you were to see something nice on the street you may want to take it or are you turned off by it because someone has labeled it as trash already?
1Joshua Reno, Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: the Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill,pg 6
In the Prologue of Six Theses on Waste, value, and Commons by Vinay Gidwani he is talking to a garbage picker in New Delhi about his work. “he was disgusted by the dirty work of sifting through garbage when he first took it up as a livelihood. But eventually, I came to like it, he said. The garbage provides me the means to live, how can I hate something that secures my existence” I find this fascinating that someone can learn to like to be around what all others discard and get rid of. “Initially, he worried about what people from his village would think should they find out his source of livelihood in the city. Would they mock him? But, all that was in the past. He no longer frets. In fact, like others who have found their livelihood in garbage, Bhagwan takes pride in what he does.” Can New York be compared to this trash picker in the sense that many people come to New York to pursue dreams but many never succeed and end up working as a waiter or waitress? do you think that hopes and dreams of many people end up being tossed out like garbage?
2 Vinay Gidwani, Six Theses On Waste, Value, and Commons, Prologue
3 Vinay Gidwani, Six Theses On Waste, Value, and Commons, pg 774
in the The Notion of Expenditure by Batallie she says “jewels, like excrement, are cursed matter that flows from a wound: they are a part of oneself destined for open sacrifice (they serve, in fact, as sumptuous gifts charged with sexual love). The functional character of jewels requires their immense material value and alone explains the inconsequence of the most beautiful imitations, which are very nearly useless.” do you think this is a fair statement? is it safe to limit jewels to being fueled as a means for sexual love?
Batallie, The Notion of Expenditure, pg119
1. In his discussions with Michigan landfill workers, Reno detects an ambivalence about the occupation and its social standing: “It is as if [they] exchange substance with the material with which they work and become waste themselves – worthless and without potential” (17). At the same time, however, the essay suggests that waste can encourage workers to reimagine creatively the devalued objects of consumer society. In what ways do landfill workers seem reticent or even embarrassed when discussing their jobs? Does their proximity to devalued objects contribute to this? And how do they find ways to subvert this situation and find new use or value for waste?
2. “Capitalist discipline operates on commons-as-waste by attempting to subsume it into the being of capital,” writes Gidwani (777). What characteristics of the commons drives capitalism to portray it as waste and bring it under control?
3. Do you agree with Waldrop’s proposition below that art and waste are always connected?
“The glorious ways of wasting the excess are great feasts, conspicuous luxury, sacrifices, rituals like potlatch in which wealth is literally destroyed, monuments like pyramids and cathedrals which are far in excess of their practical function as tombs or places of worship, and of course all art.” (189)
The work of William Carlos Williams, seemingly, argues the complete opposite: that artistic composition relies on the removal of excess. In fact, he even calls the writer’s mind “a lightning calculator,” implying that instantaneous precision, not waste, is the root of poetry (Tichi 265). Are these two views reconcilable?
Joshua Reno “Your Trash is someone’s Treasure: the Politics of value at a Michigan landfill”
volume 14, issue 1 of the Journal of Material Culture, City of Michigan
(p17)”The orderliness of sanitary landfills ,the rationalization of their work routines and spaces, offers employees the opportunity to avoid some of this contamination, For example, some workers invest in
ideololgical and material separations between “work” and “home”. Different rituals of purification intercede between these realms, as many employees throw out their work gloves, wash their hands and arms, and change their uniforms and boots at the end of heir shift”.
Mary Douglas Purity & Danger mentions rituals & purifications,. How does this relate to the power of the ruling classes, and religion.
Economies of Recycling – The Global transformation of materials, values and Social Relations
Edited by Catherine Alexander and Joshua Zed Books Ltd, London 2012
(p288) For all the labour we spend transforming material goods, we probably spend even more on keeping them the same. And this is only counting labour that is primarily directed at material objects rather than in educating or caring for other people.
Apple products are being upgraded all the time, example the apple watch was just reduced $100.00, the reason Apple is expected to release a newer version. Is this human labour; time keeping objects the same or bring new things into being?
Gidwani states in Thesis 3 that “at certain political moments, projects of capitalist value come to view commons as as an impediment and construct it as “waste,” weighted down by the double pejorative, moral, and economic that attaches to the term” (776). He mentions several examples such as the colonization of America or land settlement in British India, but what would be a modern equivalent of history revealing waste perhaps from any other previously read articles?
Reno defines reciprocal individuation as “whereby a person’s worth is foregrounded through their ability to successfully realize or identify the qualities of objects” (9). How does the landfill practices of categorization (14-16) affect this such as in the examples of Timer with his Malibu or the workers who remain ambivalent about their class standing?
One of the first questions brought up in the discussion after Waldrop’s article is how languages that include dialects or those that are multi-linguists can affect her theses. Waldrop mentions that perhaps “that might really lead to a useful new form” (196). Can specifically this idea or any of the other alarms to her theses be applied to Gidwani or Reno’s remarks about the relationship between capitalism and waste?
1) In “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure: The Politics of Value at a Michigan Landfill,” Joshua Reno summarizes the adoption of “sanitary landfills” in the 1950s. Reno emphasizes the role such landfills play in keeping waste out of sight: “the primary purpose of landfills has been to render waste invisible as rapidly as possible, to prevent them from offending senses of place and of propriety” (13). Reno goes on to analyze the ensuing change in waste work, noting that work in sanitary landfills became “a clean alternative to the activities of rag and bone pickers, junk dealers and others who became identified with waste management during the previous century” (16). However, Reno also observes a tendency for waste workers to “remain ambivalent about their class standing”: “It is as if landfill workers exchange substance with the material with which they work and become waste themselves—worthless and without potential” (17). To what extent, then, is waste work classified as middle class? In what ways do waste workers find themselves, like the waste they manage, made invisible? Can scavenging—and the skill and creativity it necessitates—provide a subversive push against this system? How?
2) In his “Six Theses on Waste, Value, and Commons,” Vinay Gidwani classifies waste as “value-in-the-making but also value’s exuberant nemesis” (780). For Gidwani, “‘waste’ is an untapped potential for capital: a boundary object…But it is also an excess or exudation that is prior to and product of capitalist accumulation that capital, try as it might, can never fully capture and which therefore is an ever-present threat to it” (779). In what ways can waste be viewed as a threat to capital? How do waste workers fit into this paradigm?
3) In “Alarms & Excursions,” Rosmarie Waldrop seems to position poetry, the poet, the act of writing poetry as waste. For Waldrop, poets are “engaged in wasting energy, time, money; wasting it beautifully” (189). Waldrop claims that “writing and the writer do not really have a place inside the social structure at all, but are outside it, opposite” (190). How can thinking about poetry (art) as waste in this way contribute to (provide an answer for) one of Waldrop’s final thoughts, namely that “it takes art to make people aware of the challenge to their thinking habits” (195)?
Reno makes numerous references to the potential for masculine empowerment in the act of scavenging. In what ways is scavenging gendered, and is this inherent or simply manifest? Is there potential for a similar feminine empowerment, and if so, what might that look like?
In Waldrop’s essay, she explores Bataille’s notion of art as “glorious waste of excess energy” and posits that this is at least one function of poetry (189). Gidwani’s article cites a key concern of Fordism: to “discipline workers to conserve their psychococial and sexual energies so that these could be productively harnessed as use-value for capital, rather than squandered in frolic” (780). Does Fordism specifically, and capitalism generally, reject poetry and the arts as a waste of energy? In claiming that “The process of writing…cannot be pure waste,” is Waldrop attempting to place poetry outside of or beyond the capitalist structure while simultaneously defending its function within capitalism? (190)
Waldrop quotes Max/Engels’s view on a writer (189). If we apply this view to poets, in most cases, they are not productive workers in capitalist economy. Waldrop writes “the whole small press world, rather than getting rich at the poets’ expense, is like poets, engaged in wasting energy, time, money, wasting it beautifully”(189). Alienation of labor does not seem to occur here and nobody is getting rich off other people’s work. Waldrop ends this part of essay with the question, “why do they do it?” (189). Can we find the answer to her question? Do you think the way poets write would change if publishers started making profits?
Rino uses words “masculinity” and “masculized” four times throughout his article. Why does he connect masculinity to salvaging waste? It seems like almot all the workers at the Michigan landfill were males. Would he still have connected masculinity to waste if most of them had been females? I have seen more instances where garbage or waste is connected to women and femininity.
Michel Foucault argued that each individual has its own place. Gidwani writes “Waste, as capital’s unruly other, sullenly—even defiantly—marks an orthogonal logic of dissipation, ever ready to evade, escape, or exceed capital’s dialectic”(781-782). How does capitalist economy deal with something flexible, transferable, and unstable substance as waste? Can waste stay outside of (M–C–M’) forever avoiding discipline?
In the essay “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure”, Reno talks about rubbish being indeterminate and losing an identity it had while being an object of quality. He refers to Douglas and says, “When things are rejected, Douglas argues, they begin as ‘recognizably out of place, a threat to good order,’ because they retain the ‘half-identity’ of their former state” (8). Do you find that the objects you no longer need present a threat to your order? How do you deal with things that possess only half of their original identity?
In Gidwani’s essay “Six theses on waste, value, and commons”, it is said that ”waste is an untapped potential for capital”, yet it is also “an ever-present threat to it” (779). What is your opinion on the relationship between waste and capital?
Thesis 3 in Waldrop’s essay “Alarms & Excursions” states that “the function of poetry is to waste excess energy” (Waldrop 189). Do you agree with this argument?
1) In “Your Trash is Someone’s Treasure,” Reno attempts to redeem the practice of scavenging from its low position on hierarchies regarding creative activity. However, he does so in a way that appears to be complacent with the traditional norms and criteria of bourgeois classical aesthetics (i.e. the aesthetic norms that have fostered the exclusions he’s combatting). He claims to want to “recognize the agency and creativity of scavengers” (7), but he does by deploying the concepts of disinterest, agency, creativity, and transgression in all their familiar forms. So my question: what are the pros and cons of Reno’s discursive strategy? What is gained and lost through his use of traditional aesthetic norms?
2) In one anecdote from Reno’s piece, he tells us about a waste yard worker named Timer. Timer is the guy that fixes up old junk cars in his garage. In his account, Reno emphasizes the connection the practice has with fatherhood, in the sense that it allows Timer “to teach his eldest boy how to sand down dents and do other ‘body work’” (10). On the next page however he talks about how Timer likes to ‘torque it up’ by “revving the powerful V8 engine and burning rubber from the tires” (11). He also talks about Timer’s pride about the tar-black streaks that stain the driveway and how “the Malibu objectified his own potential” (11). My question: are there any further connections that we can draw between the practice of fixing up junk cars and the practice of fathering (i.e. connections that go beyond the educational opportunities afforded by Timer’s hobby)?
3) In “Alarms & Excursions,” Waldrop attempts to argue for the social relevance of poetry (188). However, she also argues that the “function of poetry is to waste excess energy” (189) and that “the social function of poetry is pleasure” (190). And so it’s clear that, for Waldrop, the connection poetry has to social intervention is an indirect connection. This is evinced by her dismissal of mainstream feminist poetry as “comfort-poetry” (198), implying that it falls short of the “untamed” nature of her work. My question is this: do Waldrop’s thoughts on poetry privilege a certain standpoint? If so, what does this mean for her account of poetry’s function?