Chapter 12 - Waste

Summary

Waste is a slippery word: noun and verb; object and process. It can reference the material objects of garbage and trash, decimated or ruined places, or worn and suffering bodies. As Jennifer Wenzel writes, “waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things past the end of their wonted, wanted life. Quite literally, waste isn’t what it used to be.”¹ But waste is also linked to a kind of prodigality and excess that has less to do with scarcity than with surplus. In this sense, people can waste time and money, opportunities and chances. People can be wastrels, excessive and unproductive, squandering the time and potential that are spectral objects exchangeable for money. The category of waste – its implication in the mechanization of laboring bodies, the creation of the infrastructural systems of industrial capital, the administration of various places and populations, the usefulness and charm of various objects – is the fuel for and result of an accelerating industrial system. As such, waste is a particularly acute index of the late nineteenth century’s complex system of values.