Chapter 3 - Nonhuman Agency and the Political Ecology of Waste

Summary

The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us.

—Amitav Ghosh

The more waste modern societies produce, the less their members want to think about it, and thus dominant cultural narratives are dedicated with increasing vigor to obliterating the link between growth and pollution. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, ‘we dispose of leftovers in the most radical and effective way: we make them invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking’. Usually, waste is left out of the dominant ‘distribution of the sensible’ (as Rancière would put it) and its symbolic order, which determines and prearranges what can be visible or thinkable in advance and therefore significantly limits our epistemological, imaginative, and political possibilities. In this chapter I claim that if we are to ‘reconfigure the map of the sensible’, we need to create a political ecology of waste that persistently disrupts and disturbs the growth imaginary with narratives and practices that redefine what can be thought, said, and seen.

Capitalist economic processes are transforming material and energy into waste with increased velocity. This entropic and carcinogenic economic system not only reduces the future availability of such resources for other economic inputs, it generates toxic outputs that will alter the biogeochemistry of the Earth for millennia to come. The longevity of capitalism's ‘toxic progeny’ leads Heather Davis to label plastic pollution the ‘bastard child that will certainly outlive us’. In this chapter I will approach the problem of waste from several angles: How should we think—ethically, aesthetically, and politically—about the agency of such toxicity operating in different temporalities and on different scales? What politics of representation are useful to connect this toxic progeny with the growth imaginary in a critical way? How might we mobilize a poetics of waste in such a way that it is not co-opted by neoliberal reason, but instead encourages the emergence of postgrowth imaginaries?

In 2010, José Luis Pardo, one of Spain's most thought-provoking philosophers, published a collection of essays under the title Nunca fue tan hermosa la basura (Never Was Trash so Beautiful).