further notes

On Garbage, John Scanlan, from pg. 36-37:

And so we may suggest that garbage provides a shadow history of modern life where the conditions for its production and the means by which it is rendered invisible cast it as an unwelcome double of the person; the uncanny and spectral presence that only in death recombines with the body to realize fully the modern hope of self-identity. An identity that fingers us as merely matter. Perhaps the most adequate theoretical conceptualization of garbage is to be found in the notion of the uncanny. If garbage is the unwelcome shadow that trails the present (its deformed or spectral double) then we may recognize it in Freud's understanding of the uncanny as the eerily familiar object, image or phantom that continually resists any of our attempts to disconnect from it - it is the remainder as unwelcome presence. 'In reality', Freud remarked, the uncanny is 'nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old - established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.' Uncanny garbage then becomes capable of inducing horror because of the presumed harmful effects it has on the bodies of personal and social order, indicating their fragile and transient nature.

If garbage in all its forms can be said to represent nature (including human existence) as an endless process of generation and decay, then this is only exaggerated by the fact that knowledge and reason involve a separation of the human from the natural. This is the result of our technological adaptability - where 'technology' is understood in its Aristotelian sense of techne - meaning both that which is distinct from the totality of nature (phusis), and nature made in the human image (as Heidegger wrote, technology is the ordering of nature for use). This separation undergoes further refinement throughout the development of modernity, which from the medieval privy to the division of labour and the development of an economy of consumption illustrates a trend towards successive separations that lead to further differentiation at the individual level, which at the same time (and through the network of social associations that sustain life) results in an almost total abstraction from reality. As an aspect of the progress of Western individualism, what begins with the rationalization and privatization of excremental waste ends in the ubiquity of fashion - both the water closet and the fashion boutique thrive on the power of disposal to abolish the past, and to clense, empty and adorn the present. Thus, where the modern haousehold toilet expels the dead matter that exits from the body stripped of its positive, life giving, properties, the machinery of fashion symbolically flushes the past. Like everything else in modern society fashion is established on the basis of a strict organization of time and the fashionable lives only by the sell-by date (which is to say, once again, its death is already anticipated.)

More notes from On Garbage by John Scanlan

From "Garbage Metaphorics" pg. 35:

A peculiar way of looking at modernity might see it as a kind of figment of the transcendental imagination; as Matei Calinescu says, a heaven that is not otherworldly, but located at some distant, sunspecified, point in the future. Thus:

Utopian imagination as it has developed since the eighteenth century is one more proof of the modern devaluation of the past and the growing importance of the future. Utopianism, however, would hardly be conceived outside the specific time consciousness of the West, as it was shaped by Christianity and subsequently by reason's appropriation of the concept of irreversible time.

It is easy to see modernity then as the spectral double of its Christian predecessor, which by the advance of technology would overcome the decaying reality of temporal existence that Christianity offered only in the next world. The salient point about such an entropic modernity is that under the conditions of experience it inaugurates, it becomes inconceivable that we could now occupy a world without obsolescence. With garbage banished to the past and imagination and desire set on the future, of course garbage is overlooked by history and in memory. How could it be otherwise? And if desire gets caught up in the pursuit of pleasure - of happiness - who can fail to recongnize the irreducible truth, the aptness, of Nietzsche's observation regarding the close relationship between the necessity of disposing of what is past and successful self-affirmation.

Nietzsche: Anyone who cannot forget the past entirely and set himself down on the threshold of the moment, anyone who cannot stand, without dizziness of fear, on the single point like a victory goddess, will never know what happiness is...All action requires forgetting, just as the existence of all organic things requires not only light, but darkness as well.

It seems, however, that in the twentieth century the emergence of psychoanalysis proved the failure of such attempts at total forgetting. Jean Baudrillard remarked upon this development as an aspect of our relationship to the abundance of a world that may appear to stand in opposition to the self:

Baudrillard: Psychoanalysis itself is the first great theoritization of residues (lapses, dreams, etc.). It is no longer a political economy of production that directs us, but an economic politics of reproduction, of recycling - ecology and pollution - a politcal economy of the remainder. All normality sees itself today in the light of madness, which was nothing but its insignificant remainder.