An Ontology of Trash: The Disposable and Its Problematic Nature

1. Waste

1 CHAPTER ONE Waste Throughout their long cohabitation, waste has dogged humanity with a pack of woes ranging from embarrassment to pestilence. Yet the real problem behind these varying troubles is the ambiguity of waste. Anything and everything can become waste. We waste time, hot water, opportunity , money, potential, food, life, love, electricity, kindness and so on. None of these cases would be ambiguous were it not for the trite fact that what one person discards, some other person likely covets. Is watching television game-shows wasteful sloth or recreation? Like beauty, it appears that the phenomenon of waste belongs to the eye of the beholder. Radical subjectivism of this sort raises an inevitable question: if one and the same thing can simultaneously be both waste and not waste, does waste, per se, exist at all? The ontology of trash commences here because it hypothesizes that trash is a uniquely modern species of waste. If the existence of waste cannot be firmly established, or its essence at least provisionally outlined, the study of trash stalls before it starts. Fortunately, by probing its layers of ambiguity, we can reach a functional, albeit incomplete, understanding of waste. We shall see that the uniqueness of trash lies in its repudiation of the subjective nature of waste. Trash takes on the aspect of a monstrosity, a species whose defining features contradict its genus. Trash signifies an attempt to render absolute the essential relativity of waste and thereby answer its central problem of intrinsic ambiguity. This ambiguity revolves around the multiple revaluations of the distinction between natural and unnatural. This chapter will proceed by breaking down the complex judgments concerning the nature of waste into their constitutive parts. Waste is often bemoaned, but also sometimes celebrated according to respective evaluations of nature. When we encounter nature as the fecund source of prosperity, we want to emulate 2 AN ONTOLOGY OF TRASH its unstinting liberality. We blithely become prodigals. When, on the other hand, we feel dwarfed or bound by nature’s constraints, we tend to regard our unfulfilled ideals as wasted on account of our biological inadequacies . So alternating between shame, censure, and celebration, we attribute waste to nature or to ourselves, depending on our current understanding of our relation to nature. Amid this conceptual confusion a single, solid fact stands out: that waste does in truth exist. So long as we continue to distinguish between positive and negative, we will always face waste. For all wastes result from the inveterate human habit of evaluation. The Value of Waste Our responsibility for the phenomenal existence of waste must be stressed because it sometimes vanishes in the surrounding fog of ambiguity. If we take nature as a domain indifferent to value, one on which values can only supervene, waste will appear utterly foreign to it. Ecology teaches that on the macro level nature wastes nothing. There death gets absorbed into life through an incessant, all-encompassing cycle impenetrable to the micro level judgments of positive and negative. Now, when we deign to situate ourselves within this cycle, we would seem to lose the distinguishing marks of judgment in the vastness of cosmic indiscrimination. Certainly humans, and other intelligent forms of life, are natural products, owing their existence to natural processes which determine their capacities and structures. On this, the broadest, view of the natural, everything that goes on in the universe is natural. When a tree grows and flourishes nothing non-natural is occurring; when a species becomes extinct, even as a result of degradation of wild areas by humans, nothing non-natural is occurring; when humans clear wilderness and build cities nothing non-natural is occurring. All of these processes occur because the laws of nature are as they are. Nothing that happens can, in this sense, be non-natural. Nothing that anyone ever does can be, in this sense, non-natural.1 Nature’s universality, being absolute, without value and judgment, leaves no room for the distinctions that generate waste. In the cosmic scheme of things, the concept of waste falls from sight. At this cosmological level it costs but little effort to brush aside the otherwise disturbing problem of waste. From nature’s perspective, the phenomenon of waste appears a conceptual fabrication born of ignorance. Waste 3 Something like this God’s-eye view inspires former Executive Vice President of the American Can Company, Alexander Judd, in his In Defense of...