Great Paragraph, From On Garbage, John Scanlan c.2005

Wilst the technological appropriation of nature is 'not simply a continuation of Platonic metaphysics', to quote Robert Pippin, it does result from the adaptation of knowledge, and its apparent perfectibility through a succession of separations (or 'clean breaks') that attempt to optimize knowledge. Certainly, it is a response to historical contingencies - as Robert Pippin says, 'crises, inventions, growing paradoxes of the old paradigms, and the gradual "delegitimation" of the old science'. But it is also the separation and withdrawal that derives from the metaphysical understanding of the world (in the sense that metaphysics is always a separation and withdrawal), and is not simply co-extensive with something like capitalist produciton (as Pippin seems to suggest). What we say here, then, is that every act of differentiation - every 'clean break' with the past, creates garbage; results in leftovers. This is not to say that ways and means are not found to re-use this garbage (as I have been arguing, this is what always happens), because nothing ever simply vanishes. Things - objects and ideas, for example - may fall out of use, be declared derelict and demolished, but what results from this just constitues the material for new forms. In the facile 'garbage in, garbage out' vision of instrumentality we fail to see this (instead we only see that garbage 'disappears'), and the irony here could not be greater because of the extra garbage that the personal computer produces. Even here, however, we can detect an attempt to cosmetically alter the fact. Thus, where the Macintosh computer - which provided the basic model of the working environment for most subsequent computers - began with the 'trashcan' as the destination for unwanted files, in the Microsoft version ('Windows' which was charged with simply stealing the Macintosh idea) this is subtly altered to become a 'recycle bin' (complete with the environmentally frendly recycling symbol). While the trash from these virtual bins appears to be liberated to create space on the computer disk that can be re-used, as Slavoj Zizek noted, in reality it is practically impossible to erase and so constitutes 'the ultimate horror of the digital universe', which is that while things may be cancelled, or deleted, 'everything remains forever inscribed'. The possibility of 'undeleting' files tells us that they don't really disappear, and so a 'simple PC contains a kind of "undead" spectral domain of deleted texts which nevertheless continue to lead a shadowy existence "between the two deaths," officially deleted but still there, waiting to be recovered'.

In our ceaseless refinement, as we shall see, we yet manage to restore the dead in other forms as well.