Prompt 1: In her article, “The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash….,” Patricia Yaeger writes:
[A]n old opposition between nature and culture has been displaced in postmodern art by a preoccupation with trash: the result of weird and commodity-based intermingling. If nature once represented the before (creating culture as child, product, or second nature) and if detritus represented the after (that which was marginalized, repressed, or tossed away), these representations have lost their appeal. We are born into a detritus strewn world, and the nature that buffets us is never culture’s opposite. (Yaeger 323)
How do you make sense of what Yaeger means by this? In your analysis, pull in an example from elsewhere in her essay, or from the Calvino or Scanlan readings.
Alternative Prompt: Write a self-portrait as a waster or garbage producer. Some thing you might include (though you can approach this however you like and you do not need to answer all – or any – of these questions): What do you collect and why? What do you throw out that other people might keep? What do you keep or buy or find that other people might throw out? What makes you decide to value something? Have you ever changed your approach to waste? You may think of the Calvino article as a kind of inspiration.
I lived for a number of years in Portland, during which time a residential composting program was piloted and then rolled out county-wide. Food scraps and other organic materials were added to the already-established “yard debris” bins, which had previously been reserved for cut grass, dead leaves, weeds and the like. I had never considered composting before, and probably still wouldn’t today, if it hadn’t been imposed on me. But I soon came to take a certain civic and personal pride in it.
Every household received a small countertop composting bin: a plastic, inoffensively beige bucket with a swing-top lid and handle, about a cubic foot in size. This was meant to sit on the kitchen countertop (or under the sink) for daily use before being emptied into the larger curbside compost bin. I kept mine on the counter. I enjoy cooking and spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen, and my bin’s countertop placement was a matter of accessibility and convenience. I emptied it every night; there was no concern about foul smells or attracting insects. But reflecting on it now, in the context of our first class discussion and this week’s readings, I can look back and see that my compost bin sat countertop because, at least in part, I stopped thinking of those items as garbage in the same way that I think of plastic packaging or used tissues. They remained in close proximity, physically and in my imagination, to the food I was preparing. Both the orange and the orange peel, the egg and the eggshell, the berry and the stem, would become a kind of waste, eventually. Different destinies; but they weren’t so far removed from each other. And both had a purpose to serve in the meantime.
Hoarder or Collector?
I started collecting African figurines years ago while going to street fairs in the City. I found booths there that were selling handmade figurines. I brought a lot at the African Festival and Atlantic Antics in Brooklyn. At first I would buy the ones that meant something to me. Then I started noticing them in the dollar stores and discount stores and just started buying anything. I accumulated quite a few, and kept them in a curio cabinet.
One day my son comes home with an African mask he found in the garbage, and says here I thought you would like this. So I cleaned it up and hung it on the wall; next thing I know I’m collecting masks. People would ask what made you collect masks and I would say my son found one in the garbage and brought it home . Some would say you are not afraid hanging it on your wall it might have voodoo or roots on it I just laughed.
Then one day I see a pretty perfume bottle and started collecting them. My bedroom dresser was full of different shapes of perfume bottles. I’m dusting and cleaning my collections and it took a lot of time, and was taking up a lot of space. I was moving and packing all these knick knacks and wondering what and where I would put them in my new place.
I moved not to a smaller space, but a larger one and didn’t want to clutter up the place with my collections that I started calling knick knacks. So I started with the figurines and keep only the ones that meant something to me like the little girl with a mop of curls trying to roll her hair; reminds me of my daughter’s Ms. Don King days when she didn’t comb her hair, and the grandma spanking a little boy, I gathered the perfume bottles and had my nieces pick the ones they liked. But I kept the collection of masks.
The ones that I no longer wanted I sold at a yard sale or gave away, with none going via the La Poubelle Agreee.
As a garbage producer I am one who waists a lot, I get rid of more then I should. I am the polar opposite of a hoarder. I Throw away everything if I feel i do not need it. I am very OCD and I hate clutter or any sort of garbage in my home or work space.
One thing I do keep that most people would throw away is boxes, I keep the box to almost everything I buy, but I keep boxes for resale value. I buy something and I keep it in best shape possible because within 12-18 months a newer version of the product will come out. I then sell the product I own (which is always in mint condition) with the original box and i put the money I make toward the new item. I have a closet filled with boxes of electronics.
I shamefully admit that I do not recycle, I don’t recycle anything at all. I hate clutter and garbage so much that the idea of having more the one trashcan under my sink ironically makes me think I have more garbage. My hate for waste doesn’t end with tangible garbage. I go into my E mail account and I empty my trash can and spam folders on a regular basis. I then follow through and permanently delete everything from spam and trash.
I make sense of Yaeger’s piece by thinking of how industrial revolutions and technological advancements have changed society and that accounts for why trash has replaced nature in many modern works of art. I’m interested in the examples Yaeger uses from narrative fiction or film to demonstrate her point. The idea of a tin man from The Wizard of Oz that looks like a scrap of trash-metal being the ancestor to artificial intelligence that looks like a human being is similar to how a view of nature in The Prelude elicits as strong emotions as a view of trash in Underworld. As the other readings mention, waste also has societal and economical properties hence why as industry and technology advance, trash has to be redistributed into raw materials. The examples just mentioned from works of art are not dissimilar to reality like in the case of Waste Management Inc. recycling paper to save the decreasing environment. There you have a modern industry, that takes up space where nature once was, whose purpose is to redistribute trash as a way to preserve that same nature. Although Yaeger uses that as an example to try to discern if those actions are more in line with nature, culture or waste, she does also mention how trash “has a history of moving in and out of the circle of exchange.” I think of how hiking is an activity that promotes nature, but there is a commercial side to it where goods made up of plastic, metal or cloth are sold to aide someone when they are in that same natural environment. Since art can often be a reflection of reality, it makes sense to me that items that can be perceived as trash on their own but have value when considered in relation to say commerce or technology, would be taking the place of what was considered natural or a part of nature in artistic depictions.
Yaeger’s explanation of the contemporary preoccupation with trash in this quotations implies not only that detritus has become omnipresent, as nature once seemed, but also that it inspires culture, as nature once did. As she elaborates: “in a world where molecular garbage has infiltrated earth, water, and air, we cannot encounter the natural world untouched or uncontaminated by human remains” (332). Given that nature does not actually exist independent or outside of a trash-filled world, then, there’s little reason to privilege it as a source of culture. Yaeger’s description of the landscape architecture of Peter Latz as using “World War II and the waste of industrialism as playing field” echoes this point (335). Latz, meanwhile, sounds even more pointed in his refusal to acknowledge nature as the “before” to his work: “this situation is highly artificial…[it] has nothing to do with untouched nature” (335).
Calvino’s “La Poubelle Agrée” accentuates these arguments in two distinct ways. First, the essay presents trash using a religious vocabulary that emphasizes its import and ubiquity. For example, Calvino describes taking out the poubelle as a “rite,” an “offering,” and the “fulfillment of a vow” (102, 104). Trash collectors become “angels,” “indispensable mediators,” and “heralds of possible salvation” (104). Waste, in this respect, transcends us, as nature once did for earlier generations—Yaeger mentions the Romantics in her essay. Second, Calvino finds, in his interactions with trash, invitations to art: “there is an art to getting the bag to stick to the rim of the bucket” and “an art to tying an overfull bag” (123). Like Yaeger, this stance suggests that we live in a world suffused with trash and, therefore, should not be surprised when culture becomes a byproduct of it.
Yaeger’s attempt to show the displacement of the opposition between nature and culture is consistent with the evidence she gathers in survey of different critiques. For example, on the page following the quote above, Yaeger states that “In Narcissus, after Caravaggio we find ourselves in the midst of a queer ecology where the distinction between organism and environment disappears.” (324) Likewise, citing M. Allerwaert speaking about William Bertram, she states that “his [Bertram] wilderness of ‘interpenetrating forces’ challenges an Enlightenment order and abolishes the divisions between vegetable, animal, and human.”(326) For Yaeger, it seems that postmodern aesthetics leave no room for the presumption of rigid boundaries between discrete objects and their environments. We’re encouraged instead to consider the ways in which our traditional binaries (between subject and object, etc.) are more unstable than they might originally seem.
Likewise, she extends this critique of traditional Enlightenment binaries by emphasizing the way the instability of these boundaries plays out in our emotions and aesthetic sensibilities. Discussing the “new swamp sublime,” she claims that “postmodern detritus has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once associated with nature.” (327) And so, even with regard to the feelings that spring spontaneously from us towards the objects we perceive, there has been a marked change in what kinds of objects make suitable anchoring points for such experiences. That is, the challenges she poses to traditional binary categories do not operate on a merely intellectual level, but they also have an emotional component that further challenges traditional Enlightenment boundaries.
In her article, Yaeger claims that in postmodern art including literature and film, the emphasis on nature has been replaced with the ennobling of trash as the focal appeal. Yaeger uses examples throughout her article to perpetrate her argument Yaeger give examples of works that “challenge traditional ways of thinking about nature that include pieces of art, literature and film. I believe when she mentions that “rubbish becomes a strange vale of soul making and creativity” she depicts the idea that we are one and the same with nature. There is no binary nature verses man or trash; we are nature and trash.
I agree with the author when she expresses, “If waste or rubbish dominates postmodern art, it is not because an artistic preoccupation with detritus is new. But postmodern detritus has unexpectedly taken on the sublimity that was once associated with nature” because of the examples that gives through her depiction of different postmodern art. She also brings up the topic of ecology and how it correlates with the use and our vision of what waste represents. Her argument begs the question of if waste comes from nature how can we separate or even replace the two
Her reasons for distinguishing the displacement of nature with trash are important because it showcases the importance of the shift from nature being the focal point to waste. Yaeger points out a number of reasons including the notion that trash “is the opposite of the commodified object,” meaning that trash is tangible and a history which can be tracked. She also mentions that the interest in garbage is identified as a “rebellion against Enlightenment dialectics.” She specifically mentions literary texts as portrayals of interest in trash as a rebellion. She includes how garbage becomes a focal point in postmodern literature by listing a few examples of text that include Underworld and Invisible Man, two pieces I’ve read. She also mentions that scenes of waste and trash are focal through post modern art, because society is changing; “our epistemologies are shifting.”
In p48, Scanlan writes “Indeed, the disorder of a great deal of contemporary art is founded on the fact that either objects are not what they seem to be (usually they are worthless tat), or (like garbage) they were one thing before, but stripped of a previous character become something else within a new context. And here the simple act of ‘making’ something what it is not becomes the act that makes a mockery of any sensible or realistic ways of organizing object world.” In the past, nature was seen superior to culture. However, our society and view on the relationship between nature and culture has been changing. As Scanlan infers, there is no clear border between nature and culture in contemporary art. Our life is filled with goods produced by commodity-based industry. Garbage or detritus can be used for inspirations or materials for creating art. In this world filled with garbage, it is all about what we make of or find meanings in an object or a piece of art. Nature no longer is percieved as the opposite of culture in modern world.
I find garbage producing a process that involves several stages of decision-making, starting from choosing what to buy and ending at deciding what material should be recycled. Whenever I am purchasing a product, I never think of ways its package could be turned into a reusable material. Only when the whole of the product is consumed and I am approaching a trash bin with a package in my hand, I briefly think of the possibility to recycle this material I own. For most of the time, I throw away empty plastic bottles of water, juice and soft drinks that other people tend to keep in order to bring them back to the store for some money refund or to recycle them on their own, perhaps to feel positive about themselves for contributing to the environment. This is the reason I recycle. If I throw away a piece of object that could be reused and give the same high quality as when I received it, I feel guilty and irresponsible toward others in my surrounding. Therefore, I choose to recycle that material that I produce and use the most, and which evokes in me a strong sense of content when placed in the right trash bin. This is paper, in forms of school work, magazines, mail, calenders, and newspaper. I believe that paper is a material that tends to be recycled the most, and I give it a special value as well because a vast amount of nature has been destroyed just for some sheets to be produced. In addition to that, by throwing away paper that I no longer need “can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not to be thrown away now or in the future” (Calvino 103). I agree with Calvino when he says that the “poubelle” presents a connection between him and the rest of the world. When I throw away a reusable object, I feel that the “harmony” with the rest of my surrounding has been interrupted, in fact it no longer exists. Therefore, in the decision-making process of producing garbage, I choose to “stay in tune” with the environment and contribute to the nature and other people by being responsible for continuing the cycle of interaction.
For each person waste has a different meaning and arouses different sets of emotions. I personally think that waste is closely connected with our emotions. Everything becomes waste from the moment we do not have emotional attachment to it. In everyday life, I divide waste into two categories; first category is the waste that I do not collect and it is usually something that is decomposing or packaging that I religiously recycle. Second category, is waste that is around me, but I agree to keep it and live with it because I feel emotionally attached to it. It can be picture from the magazine, garments, or even furniture.
Lately, I am mostly collecting pieces of furniture when someone from my building leaves and throws it out. For someone, that furniture is garbage and does not have any purpose, but to me it means a lot, as it brings some new freshness to my home. That means that garbage is not something dirty and useless, but it can also be something fresh and beautiful, or maybe it can even give some new meaning to someone’s life. On the other hand, when I do not feel emotionally attached to some of my clothes, for me it becomes waste, but someone who takes it might find it very pretty and precious.
I usually value things according to their efficiency in everyday life. If I do not use things daily, sometimes I keep them just because of their colour or material they are made of, or memory that they bring back. I believe that things that bring back a good memory can never become waste. However, if emotions toward things change then value of things is decreasing and makes them waste.
Hoarder or Collector
While visiting street fairs and festivals in the City years ago I started collecting African American figurines. In Brooklyn at the African festival and Atlantic Antic I found booths with handmade figurines. At first I brought ones that meant something to me. Then I started finding them in dollar and discount stores. I had accumulated quite a few and had a curio cabinet to display them.
One day my son comes home “look what I found, I thought you would like it” it was an African mask. I cleaned it up and hung it on the wall then I started collecting masks. Family and friends would comment on my wall of masks, nd ask what made me start collecting them. I would point and say my son found that one in the garbage. Sometimes I would get you aren’t afraid it ,into have voodoo or roots. I just laughed and collected more.
Next I admired a perfume bottle and before I knew it my bedroom dresser was full of perfume bottles. As I was dusting and cleaning my collections I started to wonder wow this is a lot of stuff. I was moving and had to pack and unpack and it’s then that I realised I had too many knick knacks. I was moving to a larger home and I didn’t want to clutter the place with knick knacks. So I had to decide what to do, how to dispose of them.
So I went through the figurines and kept the ones that had meaning to me, such as the one with the little girl with an Afro and pink rollers in her hand trying to do her hair, reminding me of my daughter’s Don King days not combing her hair. Also I kept one of a grandma with a little boy over her knees spanking his behind. When it came to the perfume bottles they all had to go. My daughters and nieces had first choice of the ones they wanted. However I decided to keep all the masks
After pairing down what I was now was calling knick knacks, the rest were sold at a yard sale and given away. Nothing went via the La Poubelle.