Mary Douglas – Waste Effects
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See our Returns Policy. Visit our Help Pages. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Shopbop Designer Fashion Brands. Amazon Business Service for business customers. Just as faeces, for example, is considered dirty when it is in our kitchens but not when it is in our bodies, so it is that our classification of waste depends on the location of objects. Waste forms a denigrated, subordinate position within a spatial taxonomy dominated by binaries — clean and dirty, wanted and rejected, inside and outside. Waste is always to be found on side of the subordinate pole of these binaries; founded on a spatial distribution of things, it is our necessary negative in the attempt to order our surroundings.
This is important, because as Mary Douglas pointed out in Purity and Danger , pollution exists when a substance has crossed a border and become threatening to the system to which it now, improperly, belongs. These are, I admit, definitions of waste that makes a lot of sense for those preoccupied with mobile, urban or bodily wastes and their method of disposal. Not all waste is dirty, it not always dangerous, contagious or abject. A sense of contagion might be just one among many reasons for disposing something, but in my view it is not a necessary condition of waste.
When I finish reading a newspaper I might throw it out, not because it is filthy nor because I consider it a threat to my sense of propriety, but because I do not, will not or cannot read it any longer. Indeed, this newspaper might well hang about my flat for months prior to me throwing it in the bin. We can find rubbish in the gutter, in the bin, on the living room floor, anywhere, everywhere; it is not territorially discrete, indeed, it is often felt to exceed any one place.
Wastelands, wild and desolate regions — places are and become waste. In these situations, the presence of waste is not defined by its location as such, but a capacity to give co-ordinates, to be that place rather than be passive thing to be moved from one position to another. What we might call the spatial bias of contemporary theories of waste confuses the crucial influence that time has in manufacturing and organising things. If I discard something it is not simply because I feel compelled to order my environment into hygienic allotments of clean space — I can think of quite a few situations where this is neither practical nor desirable.
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Waste occurs as I encounter the time of things, their propensity to coincide with my actions and projects, their capacity to be superfluous to those same actions and projects; in short, I think waste makes and gives a measure of time. I hope to expand the notion of waste, then, by considering its temporal effects and, by doing so, consider a few examples when waste is mobilised to mean something quite different to the disgusting, the abject or the dirty. But this end-orientated temporality of waste is actually a little more flexible; it does not simply mark an end to people, places or things.
The vast etymology of waste I outlined earlier suggests places felt to be so large, empty or lacking in utility that they bring to bear an immobile, territorial waste out of joint with the time of human activity and proportion. This is matter that has never got going, a waste that stands in advance of our activities, a waste with which to begin. I think we can take something from this rather emphatic, Judeo-Christian view, and find a definition of waste that is not reducible to a particular spatial or physical quality, though these can often be important, and, instead, stress the sense of temporal separation structured by that which is unproductive or uninhabited.
Whether it be marking ends or beginnings, the time of waste is a time that separates and divides, it is not the time of our plans, our lives, our ambitions, it is a time beyond our control, it exceeds. For instance, far from being a lowly and despised object, we can reassess the formative role that temporalities of waste play in religious activity.
Giorgio Agamben has defined the religious, not as something that binds entities together but as that which maintains a separation between things sacred and profane: Before this paper becomes a sermon on the religious significance of waste, I want to stress that not every encounter with waste is a religious one but that waste does have this sense of separation from the time of human use or what I like to call use-time.
Yet, when considered waste, cigarette ends on the street, the oil that gathers on the beach, the stubble left after the harvest, all these things are marked not by their dis placement from place or time — I seem to locate these things quite easily —, but they are marked by a separation from the purposive and teleological temporality of human activity. This is the temporal condition of waste, it might be temporary and it is, indeed, reversible. Routledge, , Princeton Architectural Press, ; William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life Minneapolis: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination London: Reaktion, , Art and the Politics of Trash London: Tauris, , Princeton UP, , 9, Based on the Oxford Edition, eds.
Driver, The Book of Genesis ; London: Speiser, The Anchor Bible: Doubleday, , 3. A Linguistic Investigation Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, , 31, It has become, in recent years, quite common to equate concepts of waste with ideas of dirt, disgust or contagion. Objects of waste, then, stand in opposition to all that is clean, hygienic or orderly.
Of course, it is quite easy to think of situations in which we discard something without disgust or recourse to notions of dirt and abjection; objects that are considered technologically, architecturally or informationally obsolete, for instance, are frequently discarded without reference to the idea of dirt, disgust or repulsion.
In what follows, I propose, instead, quite a different approach to the subject of waste that stresses the temporal problems that things of waste present. We contrast times of waste with the way in which use brings things into a contemporary and complicit time, made timely by our projects, our plans and our activities. Use makes objects projective in this way, throwing things towards a functioning future. Waste, on the other hand, describes objects that are no longer commensurable with our action.
Objects of waste are therefore things that are no longer felt to be our temporal co-dependents. Cut adrift from the teleology of use, the time of waste is untimely, marked by a sense of temporal dislocation. There are a number of reasons why I have chosen the work of the British artist Cornelia Parker to discuss the relationship between art, waste and temporality.
Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo Summary
The first reason is a matter of convenience — her work is full of waste things, stuff that has been discarded or is undergoing a process of disposal. Her work demonstrates how these meanings can undergo change, transformation and translation. An Exploded View , Mass: Colder Darker Matter , Avoided Object , and The Negative of Words , operate in a diffuse chorus to reassess how meaning becomes attached to and validated by material; explicating how these attachments can become located, detached and reconfigured.
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Parker does not so much create as recreate things, taking what pre-exists and manipulating this condition of pre-existence in order to query the time we distribute to things. This temporal effect is particularly evident in works where Parker includes, manufactures or engages with objects of waste, with things in which the problematic distinctions between use and non-use, the active and the dormant, the telling and the unintelligible motivate our critical engagement. Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View We begin with an explosion; a common garden shed exploded into hundreds of shards, fragments, particles.
And, after this explosion, there follows a careful process of arrangement where each fragment is attached to wire and suspended within a gallery space. The shards are gathered around a single light bulb that has been found intact among the debris that the explosion has left in its wake. An Exploded View is a choreographic, almost photographic act, an assisted readymade that speaks of an event by which waste has been created — a waste, a remnant, a remainder of action caught in an unreal time that is neither fabricated nor factual, present nor absent.
These objects have been retained and displayed to unfold this weird and wired tableau that, despite its apparent inertia, demands that we follow the course of things through a process of creative destruction. On the gallery wall a small piece of text tells us that Parker had taken a garden shed to the British army and, with the help of some explosives, dispensed with this rather diminutive yet functional piece of garden architecture. As objects that signal absent times, we identify things of waste precisely because they no longer do what they once did. Mary Douglas but matter that originates from a multitude of times and places.
It is this sense of dispersal that Parker utilises, petrifies and makes mobile. Although Cornelia Parker assembles her extinct shed into something that looks nothing like a healthy shed full of tools and old bits of rope, Cold Dark Matter is, nonetheless, an enclosure made of tools and old bits of rope. What kind of relationship has been established between shed and ex-shed? By trying to unpick or dismantle something and remake it, somehow the perimeters get changed. But this shed has not failed in the Heideggerian sense; it was knowingly destroyed.
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Neither are the fragments of the shed taken up for repair or merely discarded as useless. In what sense has the shed or its contents been removed? Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the shed and the times and places it evokes have not vanished, but have become visible in a new way: In presenting these ambiguous and suspended things, Parker affects a lithe and fragile collage of associations between different events, times and places.
An Exploded View mediates these events, times and places, issuing us a challenge to reconcile its temporal and spatial locations. She heard that a small church had been struck by lightning and had burnt to the ground. Having gained permission to collect the charred remains, she arranged and displayed the fragments on wire, densely grouped towards the centre and more sparsely distributed towards its periphery. The results had so much in common with her earlier work that she saw fit to make the connection linguistically explicit, naming it Mass Colder Darker Matter. The difference between this and her earlier work is that the objects that Parker has collected, suspended and displayed to an audience, create a kind of narrative ellipsis or aporia.
This obscurity arises, among other things, through the difficulty of locating an event from which the work arose, a reliable narrative source. Parker has deliberately assuaged the bafflement of her audience and directed us towards the disjuncture felt between the time of use and the time of waste. With the agency and identity of church and ex-church held in a rich state of temporal suspension, as it was with the shed of Cold Dark Matter , we begin to see how divergent times and places might hang together.
The invocation of an event of waste, the moment where use has ceased and waste has come into being, can be seen as one way to think through this issue of autopoiesis and the self-generating and autonomous actualisation of an artwork. It provides a useful conclusion to this paper because it emphasises an aspect of waste that has so far been obscured: When we speak of waste we must automatically become time-travelling elegists that navigate the past in order to make sense of the now. Indeed, old shoes in the street or an abandoned ruin mean little without this ability to respond to a time that is both present and absent, cindered and supplemented.
In Heart of Darkness , Parker employs a formula that should now be familiar to us, stringing up objects that have spent their existence in one time and yet seem capable of making a noisy demonstration of their non-use, re-use and reassembly. As in Mass, Parker collects the remains of this event and arranges them in a cube, suspending the fragments on wire. What does become clear is that the gesture of taking these remnants, and stringing them up in order to make those objects speak in new and peculiar ways, must traverse and enact the problem of their manufacture.
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One must, then, respond to the contingent and incomplete termination that waste objects can suggest; these are things neither dead nor alive but perpetuating a spectral and untimely afterlife. Their employment within sculpture is necessarily the result of their redundancy elsewhere, in a time and place that is also felt to be actively redundant. These things neither become useless, nor do they take back the use they once enjoyed, they remain uncanny remnants. We should question how a work of art can be made timely or, indeed, untimely by using stuff that has been exhausted, discontinued and cast aside.
These are not objects with a clear or uniform tense; they are, instead, those things that feel as if past, present and future have tumbled together. It is through this temporal conflict between passing and persisting, transience and endurance, cessation and survival that makes the relationship between art and waste one that is so rich with generative potential. This is untimely art but not through any intrinsic, counter-temporal or atemporal quality of art itself, but an untimeliness that originates out of the type of matter that Parker has puts to work.
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