You are poor, lonely souls; failures; your role is played out. Go where you belong\u2014into the dustbin of history. - L\u00e9on Trotsky<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Paradoxically, while waste would seem to be that which disappears, it is in fact that which remains, that which can be neither consumed nor \u00adassimilated. It is surplus, runoff, excess. As such, it also touches on \u00adluxury, of which it might be considered the counterpart or flip side of the coin. A paradox then, as it exists primarily under the aegis of \u00adinsufficiency and loss\u2014its indigenous trait. Essentially, it is that which comes undone<\/em>. These preliminary observations afford us a glimpse of the strange \u00addialectical object that underlies the term and its wealth of \u00adpossibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But can we so easily say and specify what the term covers before grasping what is expressed (or \u201ctakes action\u201d) through it? After all, what is waste? Certainly that which has no use, or no longer has any. It is the imperfect, the failed, or the outdated. Imperfection, or defectiveness, is its mode of being, whether this be the result of wear and tear, of an accident, or of some intrinsic and qualitative deficiency. It is still an \u201cobject of time,\u201d having passed or been passed by, a product of time itself, saturated by its dimension. Also at play within it, though at a peculiar level, is the dialectic of the visible and invisible. It haunts every sphere and level of culture<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a category, waste suffers terribly of specific determinations: it\u2019s a ragbag. If one had to sketch out its semantic \u201cfield,\u201d a first circle would no doubt include ruin<\/em>, rubble<\/em>, debris<\/em>, fragment<\/em>, sediment<\/em>, dross<\/em>; and then relic<\/em>, remainder<\/em>, residue<\/em>, remains<\/em>; a third would include rag<\/em>, tatters<\/em>, cast-off<\/em>, moulting<\/em>, slough<\/em>, shreds<\/em>; and finally, in the most \u201cinfernal\u201d of the four \u00adcircles, cesspool<\/em>, dregs<\/em>, refuse<\/em>, garbage<\/em>, filth<\/em>, secretions<\/em>, evacuations<\/em>, \u00adexcrement<\/em>. The list, though not exhaustive, hints at some \u00adpreliminary directions, at a few of the \u201cmeanings\u201d attached to the term like after-\u00adimages. For even if it seems possible to organize these terms and to \u00addifferentiate them into discrete spaces, and therefore into categories, such spaces are eminently porous, each element having ramifications that extend beyond its allotted space. By contagion, each term draws more terms into its register, each closely bound to the others under the aegis, as in the grips, of loss and destruction. Ruin and remains may apply as well to a corpse (\u201cthe mortal remains of man\u201d), thus connecting with the intimate, \u201cputrescent\u201d aspect of waste, to which garbage, filth, \u00adfaeces, excrement also gravitate; similarly, with the corpse, the same terms cannot denote the \u201cnon-putrescent\u201d or irreducible elements of the body (the bones), as testified by the enduring vanitas<\/em> skull, or Yorick\u2019s, which prompts the question: \u201cHow long will a man lie i\u2019 th\u2019 earth ere he rot?\u201d1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - William Shakespeare, Hamlet<\/em>, V.i.158 (London & New York: Methuen, Arden Edition, 1981).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Human remains or debris\u2014waste still, objects of time as much as of paradox and dialectics. But the remains are also the spoils (spolium<\/em>), the trophy, loot taken from the enemy, like the wondrous armour from the warriors in the Iliad<\/em>, sharing with \u201cdespoilment\u201d the same ruinous origin in war and destruction (the ruins of a city, the remnants of an army). \u201cTrophy,\u201d \u201cloot,\u201d \u201cvictor\u2019s spoils\u201d\u2014paradoxical objects, \u201ccultural treasures\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Walter Benjamin, \u201cThesis on the Philosophy of History,\u201d in Illuminations<\/em>, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.<\/span> that would seem to be obliterated by their origin in defeat or \u201cdisaster\u201d; remains, debris, waste certainly testify to the disaster itself; in other words, again, the wastage of history, cultural residues, vestiges and detritus ostensibly elevated to the status of trophies. Waste is no longer merely the sign but the very locus of a catastrophe<\/em>, as obscure as it may be<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In any event, it would seem to be that which is most naturally \u00adsubject to the ambivalence and signifying mobility of the sacer<\/em>. Nail clippings, hair, secretions, excretions (blood, saliva, sperm, urine, excrement, etc.), whether belonging to the realm of magic or to sexual psychopathologies, these \u201cobjects\u201d always arrive at the same equation: objective data plus excess meaning equals magic (fantastical) object, in which the excess wholly disrupts or recasts the initial value. For it appears self-evident here that this notion lies at the very heart of the question of waste. A loss of value, then\u2014a devaluation\u2014that strikes objecthood [la chose<\/em>] head on, not simply in terms of usage value. The specificity of the movement, this general debasement\u2014\u201cdrawing down\u201d the category of the useful into that of insufficiency or inadequacy\u2014is that it actually issues less from a lack of utility than from an insufficiency that strikes at the very heart of the object. It is because of this loss of unity, this disintegration, that waste is no longer the thing, but its symptom, no longer the horizon of the thing, but its crisis point<\/em>. Not just an inert, broken object, open to its own \u00aduselessness; waste, as Marx once said of commodities (and it is especially true now), \u201c[abounds] in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties,\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Karl Marx, Capital<\/em>, Volume 1, Chapter 1, Section 4: \u201cThe Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof\u201d (1887; trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels, 1906), available online, at http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1867-c1\/ch01.htm.<\/span> and is precise enough to be reinvested with particular meanings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Useless and fragmentary, then, and violently incomplete, waste gradually takes the form of a \u201cpartial object.\u201d In this sphere, however, like the fetishist\u2019s foot, the part stands for the whole, which isn\u2019t the least of its characteristics, its irreducibility in a sense. For it cannot help being \u00adanything but what it is, though it belittles itself to the point of disappearing<\/em>. Like Aminado\u2019s eye, which, inserted into Simone\u2019s woolly vulva, becomes an autonomous organ in its own right. No longer simply an organ, fragment of a body, but something marvellous, incomprehensible, and whole.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Georges Bataille, \u201cHistoire de l\u2019\u0153il,\u201d in \u0152uvres Compl\u00e8tes<\/em>, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 69.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Georges Bataille here, grappling with all that can be expressed of the low and the ignoble in waste. By what disaster does the most exquisite appearance become rags and tatters\u2014a mop? By what catastrophe, by what dismemberment? The object\u2019s loss of integrity, as mentioned \u00adearlier, is alteration more than uselessness\u2014what is more useful, in fact, than a mop? The damage incurred to its integrity is, again, above all an offence to the dignity of the object\u2014not just in its dimension as a \u201ccommodity\u201d\u2014, hence the undertow of revulsion. Loss of dignity, devaluation, downgrade, a belittlement toward the ground: for waste, in what can only be said with the obviousness of a tautology, is that which is ultimately diminished, which falls. Rubbish<\/em>: that which is shunted aside (ob-scene<\/em>), also that which repels, elicits disgust, bearing its own indignity like a mark. As the symptom of the object, it also bears the stigma of the commodity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n