Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging

Coda: Improvisations on the Everyday

Profoundly practical, a place of cast-oV clothes and scrap metal and everyday survival, the empire of scrounge nonetheless constitutes an empire of alternative meaning. To live and labor there as I did is to undermine the carefully constructed cultural status of consumption and consumer goods, to muddy certainties of law and crime that others might wish to enforce, to remake even the reality of time, space, and identity. In its daily rhythms, the empire of scrounge demonstrates once again that “the cultural” is not generated only by the operations of the mass media or the machinations of moral entrepreneurs; it pervades even the most commonplace of worlds, animating the bottom of the social order as surely as the top. Beauty and tragedy, memory and emotion suVuse the trash pile, and the lives of those who Wnd sustenance in it, as surely as they do those groups and situations deemed more worthy of popular attention. Deep inside the empire of scrounge, among those compelled to construct alternative means of survival—to measure, that is, how many of their Coda 203 CodaImprovisations on the Everyday kids’ school clothes they can pull from a Dumpster, or how many scavenged aluminum cans they can Wt in their secondhand shopping cart—I found neither meanness nor mundane calculation, but instead graciousness, excitement, innovation, art—and home furnishings. The shared culture of urban scrounging—the situated codes of honor, the little moments of mutual aid, the common values of autonomy and reinvention, the commitment of many to progressive social change—overwhelmed any possibility of reducing scrounging to some simple category of crime or criminal calculation. In the dustbin of American consumer culture was waste . . . but Xowers, too.1 I discovered a further criminological complexity as well: The everyday crimes of urban scrounging arrive from all directions. For every illegal Dumpster diver, a homeowner illegally tossing paint cans into a Dumpster. For every inebriated scrounger rolling her old car up to a trash heap, a trash heap holding old bullets and booze. For every guy walking in a load of cheap malt liquor bottles for three cents apiece, a liquor company targeting his neighborhood with cheap malt liquor sold in disposable bottles, and a nearby roadside awash in the discards of drinking and driving. For each building code that Dan Phillips or Habitat for Humanity break, a building code designed to break them, to enforce a narrow aesthetics of mass production or high-end housing. Any thoroughgoing criminology of urban scrounging, I found, would need to be aimed at all manner of targets. But wandering along on my old bicycle, occupied in part with simply surviving oV what I found, I didn’t attempt any such thoroughgoing project. Instead, I tried to wait and watch, to see what the empire might oVer me, to improvise my survival and my analysis from whatever emerged. This languid pace, this happenstance approach seemed essential to the empire itself, to its slow rhythms of discovery and reinvention, and so appropriate to my immersion in it. As my colleague Meda Chesney-Lind and I have talked about more than once, it also seems a useful approach to research more generally. Over the years, both of us have found that our best work has come from research that remains open to surprise, from a sort of shambling scholarship only vaguely aware of its own destination. Such scholarship sets up a nicely creative tension between purpose and possibility, casting the researcher as an intellectual scrounger sorting among situations and ideas.2 At its best, it coalesces into something more than can be anticipated, approximating those moments of improvisational jazz when shared musical structure explodes into insight and emotion. Come to think of it, this tension deWnes cultural criminology as well, and distinguishes it from more conventional criminological approaches. Cultural criminology is less a stern social science than it is an open-ended jazz riV, played between cultural criminologists and those they encounter, played diVerently in each moment and situation— and, we might hope, played always with some 204 Coda exploratory sense of style.3 For that matter, maybe these improvisations on the everyday deWne any sort of life worth living, scrounged or scholarly or otherwise . . . or maybe they deWne any sort of life worth changing. “The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest possible manifestation of the reversal of perspective,” wrote Raoul Vaneigem in The Revolution of Everyday Life, “it is...