Foreword: Waste and Abundance: The Measure of Consumption

Author(s): Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty and Emilie Morin

Source: SubStance, Vol. 37, No. 2, Issue 116: Waste and Abundance: The Measure of
Consumption (2008), pp. 3-7
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25195167
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 Foreword

Waste and Abundance:

The Measure of Consumption

Current headlines demonstrate that our widespread search for

abundance has become a source of general concern. The press now
abounds in debates about waste management, patterns of consumption
and production, where these issues mainly articulate themselves in
anecdotal or catastrophist modes. This collection breaks away from such
approaches and shows that literature provides a precious insight into
the underlying cultural, social and political mechanisms that shape
attitudes to waste and abundance in Western Europe and North America.
The collection conceptualizes the tensions between waste and abundance
(as represented in literature), which are established as an entry-point
into understanding the evolution of social and political structures in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The aim of the volume is not to establish points of connection between
ecology and literature, or to apply principles of sustainable development
to literary analysis, or indeed to contest the marginal status of eco
criticism within current approaches to literature and the arts. On the
contrary, the volume raises a number of ethical questions emerging from
the centrality of waste and abundance to the workings of late capitalism.
Particular attention is paid to the cultural and moral factors that
condition our attitudes to waste and the ways in which literature
addresses the problematic relationship that binds production,
consumption and waste to social and political systems. The title of the
collection reflects the central questions raised by all contributors: how
are waste and abundance represented, how may we conceptualize these
representations, and what ethical problems do they raise?
The collection relates to a research area currently developing in the
Humanities, which calls for philosophical and historical approaches to
questions of sustainable development and waste management. John
Scanlan, for example, argues in his recent book On Garbage that processes
of waste production are the shadowy double of civilization. However,
this collection adopts a different perspective on the question of waste; it
examines marginal as well as canonical types of literature to produce an

? Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin System, 2008 3

SubStance #116, Vol. 37, no. 2, 2008

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 4 Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty, Emilie Morin

inclusive portrayal of the factors leading to excessive production and

consumption. These are long-standing concerns in critical studies of
modernism and postmodernism: Steven Connor's Theory and Cultural Value,
for instance, outlines broad patterns of interdependence between value
and scarcity. In this collection, however, what is under scrutiny is the
moment when the value of waste or rubbish is altered through the
processes of writing, as well as through human interactions and the
processes of subject formation.
What defines the innovative character of this volume is the
persistence with which all contributors emphasize the ambivalent
nature of waste?as both something and nothing. This ambivalence is
here conceptualized in relation to the ability of waste to operate as
something that can/cannot or should/should not be available for
consumption. The theories under scrutiny include a wide range of
twentieth- and twenty-first century thinkers, particularly germane to
provocative and creative readings in relation to these issues. The essays
comment on the ability of waste to lead various types of existence, to
inhabit social, moral and philosophical spheres simultaneously In so
doing, the volume distinguishes between different types of waste: waste
to which a social or personal value can be ascribed, whose existence in
time remains identifiable and quantifiable, and immeasurable waste,
which can be understood in spatial terms but cannot be managed
adequately Immeasurable waste constitutes a problematic moral and
ethical category, and the problems that it raises prevent its adequate
management. By contrast, examining the relationship between waste
and value opens up a fruitful line of enquiry for elucidating the
connections between the subject and the expansion of a capitalist
economy as well as the moral and ethical issues that condition subject
formation.

I. Representing Human Remains and Cultural By-Products

This section examines how patterns of subject formation in modernity

and late capitalism are imbricated in discourses of waste and abundance.
As the essays define humanity, individuality and the democratic subject
from new perspectives, they highlight the ethical problems inherent to
assigning significance to consumerism and cultural by-products. They
question the processes that enable us to ascertain the value of these
categories and show that the attribution of worth is mediated by a series
of cultural assumptions about waste and abundance. Two perspectives

SubStance #116, Vol. 37, no. 2, 2008

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 Foreword: Waste and Abundance 5

are brought together, one that considers the archive, the other, the value
of biological excess and bodily waste. As they discuss the value of what
disappears or is discarded, the essays bring to light the manner in which
representations of waste are central to an artistic counter-culture
preoccupied with marginal identities and modes of production within
late capitalism.
Catherine Bates explores the ways in which literary texts are haunted
by discourses of waste and abundance. Her analysis of the work of
Canadian writer Robert Kroetsch is a thorough examination of the ways
in which our culture designates literary value to human output. She
focuses on the papery remains contained in Kroetsch's archive and sets
these recordings of Kroetsch's life against his texts, which in themselves
trouble distinctions between literature and archive.
Christopher Schmidt's essay, which focuses on American conceptual
writer Kenneth Goldsmith, constitutes a provocative analysis of literary
production as "a poetics of waste management,/. As he traces the influence
of Andy Warhol and John Cage on Goldsmith, Schmidt explores
Goldsmith's deliberate prioritisation of waste and points to the
provocative nature of Goldsmith's artistic project in his relentless
questioning of social decorum. His essay traces the presence of an erotics
of waste in Goldsmith's work, which develops from the connections
between language, sexuality, bodily waste and technology.
Similarly, Mary Foltz charts the alterations that conceptions of waste
undergo as they become part of literary production. Her article takes the
work of writer Samuel Delany to identify the relationships between waste
management and the cultural value assigned to waste products. For
Foltz, the various ways through which waste becomes part of literature
are connected with complex processes of subject formation. As in
Schmidt's article, the provocative nature of literary representations of
waste is made explicit, pointing to a sublimation of waste crucial to the
construction of identity that Delany's work profoundly unsettles.

II. Monumental Waste: Consumption, Landfill and Recycling

While the first section of this collection examines the ethical and
aesthetic implications of representing various constructions of human
remains, the focus in the second group shifts to the practical
considerations of waste management and how such procedures are
depicted in a selection of twentieth-century literature and film. Images
of monumental waste, such as landfill sites or surplus recycling material,

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 6 Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty, Emilie Morin

are contrasted with conceptual representations of the void to

demonstrate the necessity of engaging in a theoretical analysis of cultural
excess and abundant consumerist values. Recognizing the implicit
position of literary discourse within the wider cultural system under
critique, these essays challenge naturalized definitions of wealth and
poverty, question our complacency regarding the distribution of
resources and force us to reconsider ineffectual means of waste
management that do little more than assuage the capitalist conscience.
In the section's opening article, Peter Boxall deconstructs the defining
opposition of contemporary culture, waste and abundance, by applying
a Jamesonian interpretation of "postmodern antinomy" to demonstrate
similarity where there at first appears to be only difference. As Boxall
argues, "Abundance wastes when waste becomes abundant". By blurring
the boundaries between these defining terms, as illustrated by a range of
crucial twentieth-century texts including the drama and fiction of Samuel
Beckett and Don DeLillo's ground-breaking novel Underworld, Boxall
explores our constructions of meaning and meaninglessness, challenges
complacent interpretations of history and annihilation and forces us to
consider the underlying conceptual implications beyond the surface of
accumulating waste. Recycling, in Boxall's interpretation, is depicted
not only as a practice of late capitalism but as a literary device employed
by DeLillo to make waste employable once again. This "recycling
aesthetic" enables literary texts to move into and challenge social order
and facilitates "a new, ecological accommodation between that which
we discard and that which we seek to preserve".
In her contribution on the "Immorality of Waste," Samantha
MacBride, the Deputy Director for Policy and Planning at the New York
Department of Sanitation, provides an inside perspective on the processes
of recycling electronic materials, many of which are in full functioning
order. MacBride analyzes the ethical implications of the reality of
recycling procedures by applying her experiences of the immorality of
waste to a selection of relevant twentieth-century American texts. This
prompts a theoretical discussion of the tension produced between
scarcity and surplus, the effects of globalization on attitudes towards
cultural excess and, finally, "the physio-biological disruption of natural
systems" as waste moves from the macro to the micro, from rubbish to
pollution.
The final essay in the collection, by James Ward, investigates the
transformative and productive relationships between people and things.
Ward draws upon the image of rubbish and salvageable waste material

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 Foreword: Waste and Abundance 7

in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and two films by Patrick Keiller, London and
Robinson in Space, in order to challenge the assumed priority of useful
matter over rubbish and to readdress the decipherment of literal and
metaphorical signs that leads to the perception of rubbish as things rather
than undifferentiated mass. As with the other essays in this collection,
this materially-based analysis permits a theoretical debate that
challenges the reader to reconsider cultural practices, not only of
consumption and waste production but in the assigning of meaning and
value to cultural by-products.
Susan Cahill, University College Dublin
EmmaHegarty, Queen's University Belfast
EmilieMorin, The University of York

SubStance #116, Vol. 37, no. 2, 2008

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