Waste Effects – Table of Contents

As a quick way of navigating this site I thought it might be helpful to upload my table contents and provide links. These are not verbatim extracts but versions or papers that have a close correspondence to the final text. And there are lots of other incidental posts on this site, which closely relate to the subject of waste, that have not made it into the final draft. Now that this project is almost complete, the work in progress found here will be left up as a record of the various iterations it went through before being handed in, together, as my PhD thesis.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1. Introduction
- Use-time and the End of Ends
- Waste-time and the End of the End
- Epic Wastes: “Nothing will come of nothing”
- Sovereign Wastes: Unproductive and Uninhabited
- For a Temporal Poetics of Waste
- The Beginning of the End

SECTION 1: COLLECTING WASTE

Chapter 2. Narrating the Event of Waste
- Interrupting Waste
- Continuities of Waste
– Narrating The Event of Waste in the Work of Cornelia Parker

Chapter 3. Archaeologies of Waste
- Gathering Waste
- The Contingencies of Narrating Waste
- Anthropologies of Waste: Collecting Culture, Collecting Time
- Archives and the Afterlife of Collections
- Waste Remains, Dust Dissolves

SECTION 2: READING WASTE

Chapter 4. The Poetic Economies of T. S. Eliot
- Make it Waste
- Bringing the Waste Land to Order
- Allusion, Intertexuality and Manuscript Drafts

Chapter 5. Reading Joycean Disjecta
- Waste Words and Throwaways
- A Language of Flotsam and Jetsam
- Narrating the Place of Textual Waste
- Waste in Progress
- Eliot and Joyce: Writing into Disappearance

SECTION 3: BUILDING RUINS

Chapter 6. Ruins Past
- The Temporality of Use
- The Temporality of Ruins
- Ruins and the Past

Chapter 7. Ruins of the Future
- Apocalypse, Then
- The Ozymandias Complex
- Encountering Last Things
- Concluding with Ruins

“The Stupendous Past”: Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins

A version of this text was presented at The Writing of Rose Macaulay, in Her Historical and Cultural Context, held at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 23 September, 2011. Special thanks to Dr. Kate Macdonald for organising this event.

Rose Macaulay’s late, great work, Pleasure of Ruins is one of the first books to give an expanded history of architectural decay. It represents an inquisition into the images, philosophy, theology, archaeology and literature of ruin. And, moreover, it is a book that allows its subject matter to infect its logic and form: it is a sprawling and enigmatic work; an excessive and truly stupendous book. I’d like to suggest to you that Rose Macaulay explores what it means to write about ruins, the first of its kind to analyse in any extensive manner the relationship between the disappearance of buildings and the disappearance of words used to describe them.

I. Beginnings 

But, before I get carried off into the labyrinthine quality of this work, a word of caution; a warning that seeks to qualify what Rose Macaulay says about ruins and what I, in turn, have to say about her:

Ruin is always over-stated; it is part of the ruin-drama staged perpetually in the human imagination, half of whose desire is to build up, while the other half smashes and levels to the earth.[1]

Pleasure of Ruins is neither a work of fiction nor a scholarly journey into the purely nonfictional, but a book that follows the affective qualities of its subject to make extravagant movements between the actual and the invented. Emphasising her emphatic belief in the ruin-mindedness of human beings, Rose Macaulay’s nonfiction is thick with fictional drama, breaking down its subject only to rebuild it through a dialectical, allegorical potential through which pasts blend into the present. This provocative nature of ruin is summarised by Byron in Canto X of Don Juan, “A grey wall, a green ruin, rusty pike, / Make my soul pass the equinoctial line / Between the present and past worlds, and hover / Upon their airy confine, half-seas-over.”[2] And, I think, in form and content, Pleasure of Ruins leaves us with a tipsy sense of overstated disquiet.

Simply opening the pages of Pleasure of Ruins soon reveals its airy and enormous referential range. It has a variety of genre – poetic, epistolic, biblical, mythological, scientific and archaeological – and an equally impressive variety of historical sources. Macaulay takes extensive quotations from Egyptian, Classical, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Early Modern, 18th, 19th and 20th century texts. I’ll have more to say about this referential depth later but until then I think it is worth noting at the outset that Macualay’s relentless engagement with the writing of others is one of the overriding features of the book, it is her chosen mode of overstatement. So, Rose is clearly not the first to write with or about ruin; indeed, she was not even the first Macaulay to write with or about ruin.

Gustave Doré, “The New Zealander,” in London: A Pilgrimage, ed. Blanchard Jerrold (London: Grant, 1872).

 

Concluding an article for the Edinburgh Review in 1840, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Rose’s first cousin twice removed, introduced an image of ‘the New Zealander’ to the British public. He used a projective image of London’s ruin to argue that Catholicism “may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.”[3] So prevalent did this idea of the inquisitive and judgmental New Zealander become that by 1865 Punch placed it on their list of ruined rhetoric, literary devices judged to be “used up, exhausted, threadbare, stale and hackneyed.”[4] As a side note, many of you may be familiar with Gustave Doré’s rendering of this exhausted image; it shows that racial and political outsider, wandering from the periphery of things to visit the fallen core of an empire now past. It is of course the inverse image of the grand tour we receive in Pleasure of Ruins. The sentiment shared between Thomas Macaulay’s invocation of the New Zealander and Rose Macaulay’s Pleasure of Ruins concern the travels and transportations afforded by ruin, the temporal and spatial mediation that makes ruin a thing in and of history; a thing through which we engage and refashion the past and a powerful object with which we might fashion the future.

II. Writing, Imagination, Democracy

Since writing is Rose Macualay’s chosen mode of temporal and poetic transportation, I think it worth calling into question how writing informs what she calls her “random excursion into a fantastic world” (PR, xvii). She goes on to claim that it is impossible to capture the “true” ruin (ibid) – they are constantly changing, evolving and dissolving. And, compounding this material mutability, ruins share many attributes with writing; their dubious truth is always in danger of being subsumed within the contingent terms of human representation. “ruins are always on the wing” writes Macaulay, “piece by piece they crumble away, or are transformed into something else, we stalk them down the centuries, surprising them at intervals, pinning them down, and in each stage they are less” (PR, 234). In one respect, writing about ruin serves to arrest the mutability of decay but in another respect writing suffers a comparable capacity for fragmentary obsolescence – recall the scattered prayer books which litter The World My Wilderness, the “drift of grey ashes” that signal the destruction of Miss Anstruther’s letters, or, as Macaulay wrote to Sylvia Lynd, “the charred pages of my books” that were behind after the bombing raid in 1941.[5] What emerges in these images of written decay is a familiar sentiment regarding the futility and contingency of graphic description, equally at home in the Romanticism of, say, Shelley’s fading coals as it is in the textual supplementarity of poststructural linguistics: we might try to pin ruins down but can do so only partially; they will always be less and less and less, and even that which we do manage to pin down cannot compensate for the loss of the rest. Little wonder, then, that Macaulay compares ruins to “the extant fragments of some lost and noble poem” (PR, xvii).

In her hands, ruins are a series of lost words among a world of disappearing inscriptions, fragments shored with and against words. That writing might be compared to the extant fragments of some lost and noble ruin might help to explain the extraordinary number of quotations she uses to weave her history of ruin pleasure. Perhaps her architectural subjects can only speak through these textual fragments, not so much as a tissue of quotations but more like a ruinous, polyvocal mass of extant linguistic fragments, none of which may adequately stand for a lost whole or guarantee an origin to the ruinous tradition from which Pleasure of Ruins so energetically issues. A tumbling series of quotations, expressed in a grammatical form that Sarah LeFanu has described as “a tottering pile of clauses and phrases.”[6] In both senses of the word, Macaulay’s is a work of fractured stanza. This is what makes her excursion into a world of fantasy such a modern one; it is a journey into the doubtful powers of form and transcription.

Driven by the complex uncertainties of ruins and their powers to unbalance the factual accuracies of writing, Macaulay argues that ruins make “poets and artists of nearly all tourists” (PR, 73) – ruins give a licence to roam; her book is largely dedicated to recording the records of the more rapturous and fantastical responses to Classical ruin, to which she is both an aloof and enthusiastic contributor. Ruins, for Macaulay, are “the ghosts of dead ages sleeping together” (PR, 127). In these rhapsodic fantasies, often motivated by the whispered hearsay of history, we find almost a truism of contemporary ruin theory that has been neatly summarised by Christopher Woodward, in his book called In Ruins. Precisely because ruins are materially incomplete, writes Woodward, “each spectator is forced to supply the missing pieces from his or her own imagination.”[7] Hardly a revelation, one might reasonably think, but it is an intuition important to the poetic qualities Macaulay and many others attribute to ruins. Their supplementary quality operates on textual, visual as well as epistemological levels; we do not necessarily ‘experience’ ruins directly or by miraculous isolation, but do so by mediating their liminal effects that transport our attention beyond and across the material we encounter. Our experience and consequent interpretation of ruined places become dominated by structures of metonymic correspondence and spectral supplementarity, an experience of architecture metered by a rich interplay between absent and present entities. Ruins, by definition, are engines of speculation. “Such guesses”, writes Macaulay, “are among the ruin-taster’s imaginative enjoyment” (PR, 42). Here we reach a certain kind of democratic universalism – whether you be an experienced archaeologist returning to a familiar site or a young child visiting a ruin for the first time – the pleasure of ruins is open to all. “there is room” writes Macaulay, for “all approaches in that ruin-wilderness” (PR, 213).

As I have already noted, Pleasure of Ruins argues that ruin is a cognitive quality common to all humanity, “The human race is, and always has been, ruin-minded. The literature of all ages has found beauty in the dark and violent forces, physical and spiritual, of which ruin is one symbol” (PR, 20); she goes on to speak, in overstated terms, of “that eternal ruin-appetite which consumes the febrile and fantastic human mind” (PR, 39). And yet, Macaulay is keen to explore the rather prosaic and historically divisive specificity of architectural ruin – so that they mean certain things about certain people at certain times. The “ghosts of dead ages” might be sleeping together but they are not allowed to sleep in equal comfort – Macaulay, like so many other ruin writers, hosts some ghosts and banishes others. Now I must tread carefully, there’s a finger-wagging dead end to be avoided; I will not dwell on Macaulay’s frequent allusions to those “greedy and ignorant Arabs” (PR, 135) and their disproportionate abuse of the ruins she so dearly loves. Instead, I prefer to focus on how she celebrates both the plurality of ruin response and their powers to generate a history of a highly specific nature.

III. ‘Our’ Stupendous Past

The history of ruin, as it is presented to us by Macaulay, is the qualified history of western civilisation. This is a civilisation that issues out of Greece and Rome.

in the ruin-loving dreams of western man, Persia cannot compete. It is Greece and Italy which have always mainly enshrined those wistful, backward-gazing dreams. Perhaps because it was there that our civilization was cradled and grew; we yearn back to these vestiges of our past. Perhaps because we have been bred in a classical culture, given from our youth up to understand there was the glory of the world: hypnotized, our eyes dazzle with it. Here were Socrates, Plato, Pericles, Praxiteles; here was Troy, here was Athens, the Islands, there Magna Graecia, and the tremendousness of Rome. Nothing can compete (PR, 151–152, my emphasis).

Athens becomes “the very centre of ruin-pleasure” (PR, 164). And the fortune of Roman architecture becomes synonymous with ‘history’. “Age by age, piece by piece, history falls with Rome; age by age, piece by piece, history rises as Rome rises; it is the tale of western man” (PR, 165). What can we take from statements like this? I’d like to suggest that it earmarks the duplicity of ruin as an object of historical thought: ruins are open to wild flights of fancy, dramatic moments of overstated superstition, but they can also be stages for calculated and codified acts of historical regulation, the reconstruction of an us and a them, a history of our and theirs, a history populated by victors and losers.

But, as Macaulay frequently points out, ruins are always on the move, always undergoing change, forever torn between survival and dissolution. What, then, becomes of the history that we make by these mutating entities? Although the ‘tale of western man’ might be told through ruin, the architectural basis for this history is under threat. Again, Macaulay equivocates about the paradoxical “ruin of ruins” (PR, 67). Macaulay cannot decide between the fantastic romanticism of decay or the redemptive security of the past, her past, her sense of western civilisation, that might be recovered through these extant fragments.

This conflict is born out in the rough ride that archaeologists receive in Pleasure of Ruins. By being stripped of their picturesque disorder ruins lose their poetic force, their powers of provocation. She speaks of the “familiar tragedy of archaeology—the sacrifice of beauty to knowledge” (PR, 147) and, in a marvellous moment, she claims that “Shelley would have been disgusted” if he could only see the scandal of modern Rome (PR, 202). History, Macaulay’s history, fails not in picturesque ruin but in the ruin of the picturesque – there can be no more screech-owls, toads, bats or creeping ivy once the archaeologists have rolled into town. Archaeologists corrupt the poetic history of decay. Nevertheless, Macaulay also speaks of a Dionysian battle between archaeologists, the “ruin-preservers”, and the “ruin destroyers”, those that have quarried or simply demolished ruins in order to build anew (PR, 177). Archaeology maintains ruins as well as destroys their pleasures. Excavation can make them sites of scientific enquiry that save them from redevelopment, only to lose the overwhelming and overstated effects that are the object of Macaulay’s fascination.

IV. Legacies

In 1953 Pleasure of Ruins was warmly reviewed in the British press. One reviewer, writing for The Times was quick to seal its monumental stature,

There are certain dissertations so balanced, wise, and comprehensive that they go down to future generations as So-and-So on Such-and-Such. Here is one of those rarities: “Macaulay on Ruins.” The theme has been tracked once for all, extensively, exhaustively, with wit and eloquence.[8]

And despite being out of print for decades, Pleasure of Ruins is still revered. Indeed, there has been in recent years something of a ruin fever sweeping through the social sciences and humanities. I think we can reasonably place Macaulay’s book as a precursor to this more recent fad. As a brief indication of the contemporary interest in ruin among academics, here’s a selection of books dedicated to the subject:

Michael S. Roth, Claire Lyons and Charles Merewether, ed., Irresistible Decay: Ruins Reclaimed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1997).

Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (New York: Rodopi, 2004).

Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005).

Dylan Trigg, The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason (New York: Peter Lang, 2007).

Nicholas Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of Urban Modernity, 1819-1919 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009).

Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle, ed., Ruins of Modernity (Durham: Duke U P, 2010).

Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (London: Verso, 2010).

Brian Dillon, ed., Ruins (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT, 2011).

Almost all of these reference Macualay’s book, many make a point of acknowledging its formative importance. Robert Ginsberg calls it the “pre-eminent masterpiece of ruin-writing”.[9] And, in his introduction to an anthology published earlier this year, Brian Dillon describes Pleasure of Ruins as “one of the classic studies of the subject”[10].

I’ll end with this: just as responses to ruin are always overstated, it would be wrong of me to overstate Macaulay’s role in the history of ruin writing. Ruins are both a very old and a very contemporary concern. But hers is a distinctive contribution: collating sources from an extraordinary range of generic and historical locations, equivocating the precise relationship between architecture and its description, emphasising the semantic democracy of ruin whilst advancing an exclusionary history of it, and, finally, chiding the work of archaeologists with one hand and praising them with another. If I can conclude that Pleasure of Ruins has entered some kind of ruin writing canon, attaining that monumental status of ‘Macaulay on Ruins’, then I do so and it does so through a host of speculations, contradictions and idiosyncrasies, all of which remain a pleasure of remains.

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[1] Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1953), 100. My emphasis. Hereafter PR in the text.

[2] Lord Byron, Don Juan, ed. Truman Guy Steffan, E. Steffan and W.W. Pratt (London: Penguin, 2004), X 61.

[3] Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Review of Leopold von Ranke’s The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Sarah Austin”, Edinburgh Review, 72, October 1840, 227-58.

[4] “A Proclamation,” Punch 48, 7 January 1865, 9.

[5] Quoted in Sarah LeFanu, Rose Macaulay, 233.

[6] Sarah LeFanu, 177.

[7] Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Chatto & Windus, 2001), 15.

[8] “Ancient Splendours: The Lure of Ruins”, The Times, 9th December 1953, 10.

[9] Robert Ginsberg, Aesthetics of Ruin (New York: Rodopi, 2004), 463.

[10] Brian Dillon, “Introduction: A Short History of Decay” in Ruins, ed. Brian Dillon (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT, 2011), 11.

‘Unproductive and Uninhabited’: Wastes of Place and Time

A version of this paper was given at the Rubbish Symposium, held on 30th July 2011 at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Part of my aim with this paper is to suggest that the topic of waste and the things we call waste should be treated expansively. The logically excessive, the semantically superfluous should, I think, assist our exploration of what waste is, rather than be treated as obstacles to overcome. I’m keen to avoid the denigrated and trashy sense of ‘mere’ waste and I want, instead, to tune into the fundamental and formative importance of waste in giving measure to our lives.

I must admit that this paper is born out a frustration with how the topic of waste seems to me to have become rather limited, closed down by a kind of discursive echolalia; I’d like to criticise a set of concepts or ways of thinking about discarded things that to me just don’t seem quite adequate. Chief among these, and most recurrent in recent writings on the subject of rubbish, is the regurgitated mantra that waste is “matter is out place”, a definition first given by Lord Palmerston in the mid-nineteenth century and incubated by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas, in her book Purity and Danger.

Douglas’ book is about purity, hygiene and notions of the dirty, and these important concepts have since migrated into more general understandings of rubbish in the social sciences and humanities. I prefer to use the word waste to describe the things that have, for whatever reason, been leftover from use or for which use has been precluded. My preference serves certain rhyming and rhythmic purposes but ‘waste’ also seems the only word capable of resounding beyond the echo chamber that I think academic understandings of rubbish have entered into.

For Douglas dirt is a spatial problem, a question of not what stuff is but where it is. It is a definition that is an outcome of spatial constructivism, of how we organise our environment. “Dirt”, writes Douglas, “is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”[1]  Rejecting things brings order. Displacing things is a sign of order taking place. Dirt is only dirty in certain places, when it is out of its correct position. 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. Originally published in 1966 and in print ever since, Douglas’ intuition about finding order by rejecting stuff has led to a large body of work that has defined waste in similar terms. 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.[2] The subtext to all this is that waste is a bad thing, a thing to be avoided.

Here are just a few examples, all taken from recent publications, that show Douglas’ theory seeping into more general discussions and definitions of waste.

John Scanlan, having cited Douglas, concludes that,

“daily acts of cleaning, scrubbing and concealing that we routinely indulge in conspire to remove the dirt, to hold the garbaging of the self at bay, and to put some order over our affairs, our bodies (and so on), we must recognize the symbolism of garbage is perversely found in its opposite of order and cleanliness, in the objects and arrangements that temporarily conceal it [...]”[3]

Gillian Whiteley:

“All dirt is relative. Clearly, ‘matter out of place’ is ‘trash’ in one diverse modality of living – and treasure – or matter in place ­– in a different interlinked, coeval one.”[4]

Sophie Gee:

“Waste, even if it does not putrefy, is abject because it is characterized by misplaced, animating excess [...] Waste is a form of pollution, marked as such by having participated in a process; that process is one wherein substance stops being acceptable or even valuable and becomes unwanted or taboo. 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.”[5]

I’d like to summarise this confluence between dirt and a more general definition of waste in this way: the will-to-order, to which waste plays a malleable and objective antagonist, makes explicit the connection between the legibility of refuse and our acts of refusal. 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. But I have one or two conjectures that should caution against this too friendly elision between Douglas’ theory of dirt and its application to the concept of waste.

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. I can think of it as rubbish long before I put it ‘in’ or ‘out’ of one place or another.

Secondly, and related to my first point, it should be noted that we recognise waste everywhere and not just in the places where we think it ‘should not’ be. 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. Within the idea that waste is “matter out of place” lies the problematic suggestion that place is always bounded, discrete or delimited, and that place and matter are somehow separable. It is, I think, this separation of matter from place that makes the ‘matter-out-of-place-paradigm’ particularly unhelpful.

The idea that objects of waste are relatively small things contained within relatively large places can be challenged from a variety of angles – not least the way in which we use the word ‘waste’ to describe places. The earliest recorded uses of the word ‘waste’ invariably accounted for an enormous and empty sense of territorial separation, a depopulated landscape. As the OED describes, waste can mean an “uninhabited [...] and uncultivated country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, [a] wilderness”.[6] The early uses of the word reflects its Latinate etymology: we take ‘waste’ from vastus, giving waste the same Latin root as the word ‘vast’ and meaning spaces that are void, immense or enormous – waste, in this light, is already a matter of place, overwhelming the spatial borders or boundaries we hope to set for it. 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.

As you might have guessed, the idea that waste is “matter out of place” strikes me as a little too tactile, hand-held, conservative; it loses sight, I think, of the vast and epic nature of rubbish that I have just hinted at. Douglas’ terms might be useful for describing moments when waste represents a resistance to my drive to cleanse and purify my environment, but deficient when considering the broader philosophical, temporal and theological dimensions of obsolete things.

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. 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.

I think we’re all familiar with how ruination is a popular feature of the apocalyptic imaginary; visions of waste can mark the end of a time, a place or a civilisation. There are so many literary, scriptural, political or cinematic examples of this, I’ve chosen just two of my favourites. I rather like the moment when the two “discarded fathers” of Shakespeare’s King Lear – Lear and the Earl of Gloucester – meet one another on a waste land, the moor that dominates Act 4. During this intense conglomeration of differing wastes, Gloucester hears the now mad King Lear and exclaims, “O ruined nature, this great world / Shall so wear out to naught.”[7] Gloucester sees in Lear’s ruin the end of the natural world, now cursed to decay and dissolve, waste marks an end. Alternatively, consider this extraordinary painting by Joseph Gandy, showing Sir John Soane’s Bank of England in an apocalyptic state of ruination. It was a painting commissioned the same year that work on Soane’s building was completed; this wasted condition provides a means to articulate the building’s finitude, its projected end.

Joseph Gandy, Soane’s Bank of England as a Ruin (1830), John Soane Museum, London

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.

Consider the Judeo-Christian belief, described in the Book of Genesis, of how the creation and distribution of the earth’s resources was founded upon a formless void. Genesis 1:2 can and often is translated as, “And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”[8] Variants in translation suggest that the earth was “without form or void”[9] or was “formless and empty”[10] but, semantically and etymologically, all conclude the original state of the earth prior to God’s intervention was one dominated by a vast and uninhabitable conception of waste that medieval uses of the word then tended to uphold: “a wild and desolate region, a desert, [a] wilderness.”

Some of the variation we find in English-language translations of this biblical waste are due to the peculiar and rather idiomatic Hebrew expression, ּובהוּ תהו tohû wābohû, which Judaic scripture employs to describe the condition of the earth in this ambiguous and desolate condition. There remains considerable debate about how to interpret and translate tohû wābohû but, following the work of David Tsumura, we may make the following distinction: tohû means a “desert” or “waste land” and bohû means “empty” or “uninhabited place”. Tsumura concludes that tohû wābohû should be understood as “unproductive and uninhabited”.[11] At the beginning we find an environment separate and distinct from all that is human, at the beginning we find a time that does not produce.

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: “Religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere.”[12] Put beyond common use, the reversible condition of waste might be said to fall on the side of the sacred. As Paul tells God’s elect in Corinth, “we are the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world” (1Co 4:13). 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. The tohû wābohû of Genesis, among other things, reflects a vision of matter at a point of absolute separation from the human, a world that falls beyond every possible human project, plan or ambition, unencumbered by the teleological imperatives of human use and command.

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 displacement 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. But as waste, having ended or never having fully begun, these are things or places that lack the anticipation of utile and temporal ends, they linger, they remain, they are time’s leftovers.

I’m going to end here – with the suggestion that waste might be quite useful in making time and in keeping time. It’s not just a thing to be shuffled about, in the Punch and Judy show of modern commerce and sociology.

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[1] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo (1966; Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 44. My Italics.

[2] See, for example, Dominique Laporte, History of Shit, trans. Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el–Khoury (1978; Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002); Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997); William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2005); Ben Campkin and Rosie Cox (eds.) Dirt: New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008)

[3] John Scanlan On Garbage (London: Reaktion, 2005), 43.

[4] Gillian Whiteley, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 24.

[5] Sophie Gee, Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010), 9, 10.

[6] The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition. 1989.

[7] William Shakespeare, “The Tragedy of King Lear,” in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), F.4.6.130–131.

[8] S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis (1904; London: Methuen, 1948). Others have “a formless waste”, see E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible: Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1983), 3.

[9] Revised Standard Version

[10] New International Version

[11] David Toshio Tsumura, The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2: A Linguistic Investigation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989), 31, 42.

[12] Agamben, Profanations, 74.

Artists Announce They’ve Found All The Beauty They Can In Urban Decay

Phew, The Onion have put me out of my misery:

DETROIT—After spending more than a century exploiting urban decay to create deeply moving, socially conscious works of art, the art world announced Tuesday that it had captured all the beauty it was going to find in rusted-out cars, abandoned houses, and condemned industrial sites. “These modern ruins speak to the very heart of the human condition, but at this point every last inch of Detroit and Oakland has been documented in photographs, on film, or as part of a multimedia installation,” said artist Devon Gerhart, who told reporters that devoting so much time to contemplating the wounded grandeur of blighted cityscapes had led him to the point where he just wanted to see the places cleaned up. “I made my career portraying the plight of the homeless, but now I’m starting to wonder whether they’d prefer it if someone just helped them find a place to live.” The world’s artists later confirmed plans to spend at least another 50 years churning out heavy-handed depictions of the inherent soullessness of suburban sprawl

Basil Bunting – Ode 11

To a poet who advised me to preserve my numerous fragments and false starts

Narciss, my numerous cancellations prefer
slow limpness in the damp dustbins among the peel
tobacco-ash and ends spittoon lickings litter
of labels dry corks breakages and a great deal

of miscellaneous garbage picked over by
covetous dustmen and Salvation Army sneaks
to one review-rid month’s printed ignominy,
the public detection of your decay, that reeks.

From Basil Bunting, Complete Poems, ed. Richard Caddel (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 2000), 107.

The Event of Waste

Waste has often been associated with change of some sort, a change through which things seem to take on different meanings, values or relations over time. This change has been understood physically, relationally or even in the contingent terms of ‘value’. An important consequence of this association between waste and these various forms of change is the tendency to imagine waste as offering a special event through which to understand how objects achieve a change in meaning. In this regard, the change offers a plateau by which to assess not just the subject of waste itself but the ontological status of material things more generally. The transition between different times, between times of use and non-use, value and diminished value, functionality and non-functionality, makes waste a clear example of how things “constitute a key device in helping us recognize historical changes.”[1] Moreover, the event of waste gives witness to how discarded things are temporally and spatially dispersed, that attempts to narrate these events are simultaneously attempts to order, gather and collect things that end and remain.

By lingering beyond an end, by being both a material continuity and a temporal discontinuity, waste invites a quality of retrospection felt to be a function of waste and its cause. Waste becomes a bit like those tyre marks one sees on the surface of a road that tell us of an event that has past, a trace or residue of time to be forensically assessed. And, whether it is ‘commodities’, ‘texts’, ‘things’, ‘architectures’ or ‘environments’ that are under discussion, theorists and philosophers of these entities have frequently understood the advent of waste to provide some kind of event by which to contemplate the stuff these entities are and were. The opportunity to consider what an object does (or can no longer do) and how people use it to make sense of the world, transforms waste objects into polyvalent intermediaries of all manner of ideas, beliefs, stories, and accounts. This study makes the case that all the indices of ‘change’ one might wish to deploy through waste, as well as the narratives that attempt to describe and translate these deployments, must, at some point, be expressed in and through time. To be meaningful these indices must relate to, and therefore inhabit, a temporality of waste replete with affective ends. So, whilst architectural ruins are frequently described in aesthetic, environmental, financial, political or even molecular terms (depending on who or what is doing the describing), the importance of waste-time in announcing these developments remains a common denominator. In order for waste to mean all the things it can mean, a time is produced and the event of this temporal production can be described.

I. Interrupting Waste

There exists a tendency to situate an object of waste somewhere between two extremes: as ‘just a modest thing’ by which to measure some process or change, or more spectacularly, as a site from which to experience a full-blown revelation. The former sees waste as a mere outcome or product of time (its time has ‘run out’, it has ‘had its day’, ‘past it’). The latter elevates waste as the necessary condition for spiritual, artistic and political change – i.e. it helps to form and articulate time itself. The discarded shoes discussed in the last chapter had a denotative and connotative potential that comes to rely on the production of varying temporalities, characterised by an orientation or disorientation to a functioning future. Whenever we assess ideas about waste we should always try and understand how its relationship with time is being represented – is waste passive or active, the product or producer of time? These positions are rarely given such clear expression since they are regularly mixed and muddled, compounding the feeling that waste objects are untimely or without a proper time of their own. But somewhere between the ‘wastes of time’ (time producing waste) and the ‘times of waste’ (waste producing time) lies the notion that the advent of waste is rich with revelation, a thing of pedagogical potential that allows the everyday, the hidden or the unexpected to be suddenly unveiled. Recognising waste is to recognise the events and actions in which things are embroiled; the temporal separation felt between a discarded thing and the activity in which it no longer participates gives a position to assess, discern and narrate how the order of things always depends upon the order of time.

In his introduction to ‘Thing Theory’, Bill Brown suggests how waste objects might participate in a secular revelation of everyday things. The following quotation explains how an interruption to utility might provoke a reconsideration of an object’s meaning:

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.[2]

Although Brown does not address the condition of waste as such, he does describe how things can suddenly cease to relate to the designs of “the human subject”. In a way that correlates with a movement out of use-time and into a time that no longer concerns our projects and aspirations, Brown suggests that we come to know an object in a new way when we can no longer put it to use. When an object ceases to feel complicit in our tasks, plans or futures, when we are shaken from one collective arrangement with that object and thrust into another, our relation with the thing moves beyond mere use to confront the subject-object relation that has passed. For Brown this permits a confrontation with what he calls “the thingness” of the object, disclosing our compulsion to master and manipulate things, asserting a material presence that is somehow outside our control. By paying attention to Brown’s language, which is replete with ‘flows’ and ‘arrested moments’, one understands that, for him, the advent of waste provokes an odd sort of event, a hesitancy or interruption before the temporal continuum of material things. Through this interruption the agency of objects is contingently revealed; waste exposes a certain state of affairs by casting a “subject-object” relation into the past, into the realm of the no longer. Time, of course, is inscribed within this movement; the object marks the passing of a projective time that has been structured by our use of an object. It shows time to have been within the employment of a project that evolved through an assembly of material actors, actors no longer caught up in that particular collective arrangement. Should we respect the temporality already at work in Brown’s text we might add a slight amendment to his observation, “the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation”, noting how this subject-object relation remains implicit without such interruptions; the event of waste creates retrospection and helps to expose our momentary relations with things, precluding a determined future and enclosing a past.

With a slightly different emphasis on the idea of the commodity, Julian Stallabrass’s discussion of trash leads us into similar territory. Having highlighted how, by manipulating desire, the commodity fetish motivates and intensifies our production of waste, Stallabrass describes how the obsolescence of the commodity endows waste with a peculiar power to disclose reality:

In becoming rubbish the object, stripped of this mystification, gains a doleful truthfulness, as though confessing: it becomes a reminder that commodities, despite all their tricks, are just stuff; little combinations of plastics or metal or paper […] We see them[, the objects,] for the first time with clarity, which is the same as that clearsighted ridicule with which we greet old adverts and the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of design in old commodities: their arbitrariness and alien nature are suddenly revealed.[3]

Although Brown and Stallabrass argue different points within different critical traditions, they provide the opposing sides of a common coin. For Brown, the snapping tool snaps us out of our phenomenological inattention, where the use of an object blinds us to how things ‘really are/were’. We are rocked out of our habitual relations with objects at the moment when they appear able to impose themselves as independent entities, when they no longer function according to our designs or expectations. For Stallabrass, on the other hand, when objects cease to function they shed their arbitrary, pantomime act as commodities. By becoming waste these objects are released from the straitjacket of the commodity fetish, driven by the predominance of exchange-value, in order to reveal how things ‘really are/were’. In both instances, waste is said to put an end to a time that is ordered by use and replaces it with a convolved, communicative inertia; objects no longer seem to do what they did and yet enjoy an increased propensity to convey this inactivity. No longer active in one kind of future waste seems to animate the time that has passed, punctuating continuity with a material, thingly shape. Yet, by doing so, the event of waste seems to reveal how our experience of time is underwritten by the things that we use, time materialises and is made material through our projects, plans and ambitions. Brown and Stallabrass show that when objects become waste they come to act in unusual ways. However, the meaning of things is not achieved within a temporal vacuum, if the event of waste reveals the peculiarity of objects, then time might be made peculiar too.

Although John Scanlan’s On Garbage provides a somewhat different perspective on the temporality of waste, it ultimately rehearses the conclusions that were drawn by Brown and Stallabrass. Scanlan argues that when something is considered waste it loses all value, it even loses the power to signify: “stripping it of any descriptive characteristics that allows us to individuate it”.[4] It is Scanlan’s emphatic belief that, in becoming a thing of waste, an object loses all distinction other than the distinction that makes it a waste object, “objects of refuse ha[ve] no meaning apart from the negative undifferentiated one that declare[s] their lack of worth ­– the total absence of distinction in the damaged or soiled object”.[5] The waste category behaves as if it were a monolithic eraser of signification or difference. A paradoxical category, Scanlan’s notion of waste makes it at once absolutely undifferentiated and yet profoundly different to everything found extrinsic to it. Regardless of whether we believe that such a notion is even possible, Scanlan’s emphasis on the process of becoming waste is as pronounced as it was in Brown and Stallabrass. Again, much of this is born out of how waste is considered a product of time. “Time”, writes Scanlan, “fundamentally conditions the creation of garbage in that it provides the framework within which things become corruptible and useless.”[6] Time, as a provider of ‘frameworks’, secures distinction for indistinct objects. Regrettably, Scanlan does not supply more in terms what this temporal framework might look like, how well it is constructed or how it might correspond to the objects he describes. Suffice to say, time offers Scanlan some kind of static and unchanging backdrop by which things become articulate.

Whilst waste can be taken to mark a change played out on a temporal stage, it cannot do so passively or without affecting the way this stage is experienced and reproduced. Although time creates waste by tracing and articulating a change in things, should we not ask how waste informs what is meant by time? Since the advent of waste occurs in and through time, it provides us with an event that marks, measures and transforms duration. So, just as it is hard to imagine the decline of Communism without the destruction of the Berlin Wall, the fall of the Roman Empire without the sack of Rome, or even the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl without the ecological and architectural ruination and abandonment that followed, so it is hard to imagine how our experience of time went unchanged by these events. Whilst triumph and catastrophe frequently carry a waste content, it would be wrong to think that the catastrophe begins with an ‘idea’ of an event as an abstract presence or logical mystery. Instead, the catastrophe begins and is maintained by the motion of things through time.

My conception of ‘the event’ is rather different to the radical indeterminacy attributed to events in the writings of Jean-François Lyotard and Alain Badiou. For them, an event is that which lies beyond our comprehension. Lyotard claims that “to encounter an event is like bordering on nothingness” and Badiou similarly argues that the event has no objective existence but only by an “interpretative intervention”.[7] In its unfounded nature as neither reducible to an element nor comprehensible as a sum of its parts, the Badiouian event “departs from the laws of being.”[8] These versions of events have no material form; unrepresentable, ineffable, they cannot be made legible in a story. I maintain that the event requires description to be telling and intelligible, and, whilst Badiou is right to suggest that each event is a fragment of a story with respect to the infinite occurrences that can be associated with that event, processes of concurrent material fragmentation mean that the experience of waste, ruin and other expressions of material exhaust are not just the product of interpretative invention or intervention but are visible, physical traces. It is our intimate use, our knowledge, expectation and skill in dealing with things that makes the temporal separation of waste an event supported by material which persists and lingers, an evident and tangible remainder of past action. This makes what I have loosely called ‘the event of waste’ the observed or assumed transition where a thing falls into the mixed and disorientated time of waste. The articulation and fashioning of time occurs in occasions both routine and utterly unanticipated, things give us the mark and measure of time. If we could simply anesthetise an object in order to study the time it is said to inhabit (or vice versa) it would certainly help us come up with a general theory of waste objects. But to do so would reinforce a Cartesian division between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ that tends to neglect how the creation of waste does not merely happen in time but is time’s co-creative element. It is clear at this stage that the relay between an object, its status as waste, and the event it is said to represent produces a complex web associations. In this respect, each actor in this triumvirate (object, event, time) should not be made to be a passive intermediary or homogenous substitute for another; each associates and transforms the other. Waste, among other things, transforms time to make the event knowable and available for narration.

Brown in particular, and Stallabrass and Scanlan to a lesser extent, share in a particular philosophical tradition, a philosophy which revels in how time is exposed through things. Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the broken tool – which, according to Graham Harman, provides us with “the greatest moment of twentieth-century philosophy”[9] – serves as an exemplary and influential example of how waste might reinforce an ontology of objects in time. The Heideggerian thesis on the failure of equipment is of great relevance to the idea of waste as an event of conspicuousness, an instant when something previously hidden comes to our attention.

For Heidegger, equipment (Zeug, stuff or paraphernalia[10]) is composed by its “equipmentality”, the contextual references to other things. A single piece of equipment always relates and belongs to a totality of useful things. Equipment, whilst contextually given within the totality of the world, is orientated to and by the workings of outcomes. It should be stressed that Heidegger’s understanding of ‘equipment’ can designate mountains, roller-skates and wild bears, not just the hammers, jugs, or other technologically ‘simple’ entities that he addresses directly. This is important because it takes us beyond Stallabrass’ interest in the ‘commodity’, which appears to limit the concept of waste to things that have entered a particular economic arrangement, and it also takes us beyond the somewhat domestic and familiar objects – which need to produced, distributed, consumed and exhibited ­– that Brown uses as his points of reference. Moreover, Heidegger’s conception of objects amount to a networked totality of equipment or things, and each equipmental entity is related to the world of equipment and applied to particular assignments at certain times. Objects take their definition not from what they are, in some static or ideal condition, but from the “various ways of the ‘in-order-to’, such as serviceability, conduciveness, usability, manipulability.”[11] The ontological status of a particular object depends upon how it is put into the service of our dealings, our concern and the broader totality that Heidegger calls equipment. This projective interaction with things, with its structure of the ‘towards-which’ and the ‘for-which’, enacts the peculiar condition Heidegger terms “readiness-to-hand [Zuhandenheit]”.[12] For Heidegger, this readiness-to-hand is a symptom of a kinetic, assigned and future-orientated manipulation of physical objects. By being caught up in the structure of unfolding work, the presence of the object is cast into the background. We are absorbed in the world of the thing and not the thing itself. As Harman explains, “the more efficiently the tool performs its function, the more it tends to recede from view.”[13] Importantly, objects as equipment are not permanent fixtures but frequently break or go missing. An object can become unusable and, by becoming so, makes conspicuous the contextual relations suspended:

We discover its unusability, however, not by looking at it and establishing its properties, but rather by circumspection of the dealings in which we use it. When its unusability is thus discovered, equipment becomes conspicuous. This conspicuousness presents the ready-to-hand equipment as in a certain un-readiness-to-hand. But this implies that what cannot be used just lies there; it shows itself as an equipmental Thing which looks so and so, and which, in its readiness-to-hand as looking that way, has constantly been present-at-hand too. Pure presence-at-hand announces itself in such equipment, but only to withdraw to the readiness-to-hand of something with which one concerns oneself—that is to say, of the sort of thing we find when we put it back into repair.[14]  

Heidegger is keen to stress that the loss of readiness-to-hand does not become replaced by a pure presence. Instead, presence is announced but restrained by our concern for the thing, through its repair and reassignment. But what if we do not concern ourselves with the broken equipment, what if we do not repair the object or return it into active service? In this regard Heidegger has little to say on the matter of waste, other than that discarded objects cease to become equipment and become ‘equipment’, and, despite this change, remain ready-to-hand. ‘Equipment’ becomes a kind of waste for Heidegger, “in the sense of something which one would like to shove out of the way. But in such a Tendency to shove things aside, the ready-to-hand shows itself as still ready-to-hand”.[15] Contrary to Scanlan, Heidegger believes that objects that no longer relate to our projects and plans maintain some association with their former role as useful things. They become ‘equipment’, conspicuous things thrown into inverted commas, momentarily wrenched from the referential structures that have hitherto secreted them within the service of a particular project. The advent of waste provides an opportunity to reassess these assignments, the event of waste enacts a specific kind of reversal where what was once retiring or implicit has suddenly become explicit. The presence of the object appears between the disappearance of one expression of readiness-to-hand and the appearance of another, and between each expression of readiness-to-hand a break occurs that lights up the thing in question.  This is not to say that the structure of reference had never been comprehended until this moment, but the disruption of the ready-to-hand serves to locate the object in a particular time and space. It caus

a break in those referential contexts which circumspection discovers. Our circumspection comes up against emptiness, and now sees for the first time what it was ready-to-hand for. The environment announces itself afresh. What is thus lit up is not itself just one thing ready-to-hand among others; still less is it something present-at-hand upon which equipment ready-to-hand is somehow founded: it is in the ‘there’ before anyone has observed or ascertained it.[16]

The event of waste is a time-creating phenomenon, announcing a present that was otherwise overwhelmed by the future. The seizure and subsequent revelation of a disrupted contexture denotes the ‘there’ of the object, its particular location in space and time. Bill Brown would have us believe that the failure of equipment merely discloses a particular subject-object relation. Heidegger’s thesis is far more ambitious. The failure of equipment discloses our relation with space, time, or our being-in-the-world. It does not simply reveal how we perceive things in the world: it reveals the projective nature of Da-sein. If equipmentality is embedded within the referential web of the world, then it follows that any interruption to this equipmentality, or attempt to thrust this equipment into inverted commas, must reveal both from what and how this referential web is composed. The advent of waste puts objects at a threshold by which pre-existing structures of meaning are called forth to expose their fragility. For Scanlan on the other hand, the disruption of pre-existing codes means that waste objects somehow fall from referential structures altogether. But in Heidegger’s philosophy of things, the temporality of the broken tool and the event it produces keeps waste from negating meaning. As Heidegger is careful to point out, the interruption to the ready-to-hand is precisely that, an interruption; the object does not simply disappear but it becomes ready-to-hand in a new way.

An undeniable tension has persisted so far in our investigation. Whilst these theories might point to the sensational occurrence where an object of use, function or serviceability is ‘suddenly’ and ‘momentarily’ lit up, what happens when this failure is expected? It might be convenient to speak of ruptures, seizures and so on, especially since these temporal metaphors help us to conceive the dramatic or arresting encounters we might have with waste things and the durations they are said to represent. Indeed, catastrophes and the waste they produce are frequently expressed through this kind of seismic temporal event. And on the occasions where our circumspection does in fact wheel around and focus on the thing that has, until that time, gone unnoticed, it might be useful to think with the terms that Heidegger et al suggests to us. Yet, when I finish reading my newspaper, I probably do not enjoy an encounter with the referential contexture of ‘the world’, and, for the majority of our meetings with waste, we rarely have this momentous sense of event or revelation. We must now consider the occasions when we know full well that waste will be the outcome of our actions; the formative importance of waste, time and their narrative description will remain a pressing concern.

 II. Continuities of Waste 

Until now we have considered a specific kind of waste event, where things suddenly divulge the assignments by which they took their meaning. Time is made by a break, an interruption or conclusion of use; waste creates an event by disrupting the continuity of use-time. But many things take their meaning from being assigned to being broken; their readiness-to-hand is felt through the inevitable sense that this readiness-to-hand is achieved not through the unexpected discontinuity of use but by an anticipated consummation of use-time. Things go to waste; moving, drifting or driving towards an inevitable end. In Heidegger’s writings we saw how using and employing things might cause a form of inattention to the time of things, which provides the conditions of our surprise when they fail. This may well be the case for a great many objects, particularly those things we consider most durable, or for those who like to do their DIY in a wild frenzy. Yet this sense of inattention certainly does not tally with some foreseeable or desirable expressions of waste, to which we will now turn.

Things give, make and take time. An object’s material qualities play a fundamental role in lending duration to our activities, to the perception that some things are more durable than others or are intrinsically transient. Heidegger’s hammering thought experiment supposes that all hammers hammer in the same way over time, until they suddenly break and light up their referential context. But a hammer made of steel can be expected to hammer nails for longer and with different effects than a hammer made of jelly. Hammers will break in different ways according to the nature of their design, the materials and techniques of their manufacture and the sort of hammering they are put to. The circumstances, durations and, of course, the actual nature of the thing being used will alter the ways that waste is felt to occur.

We expect waste to be an outcome and frequently the necessary outcome of a process; things of waste often signify closure, resolution or a termination. Consider the leftovers produced when eating or creating energy. The disposal of a banana skin might be seen as the necessary consequence of eating a banana, carbon dioxide might be said to be one consequence of burning fossil fuels for energy. In this regard, economists speak of ‘externalities’ (often prefixed with the words ‘positive’ or ‘negative’) to describe the expected by-products of a process. Whether for good or for ill, the externality of waste is frequently found at the scene of numerous activities, often playing an integral role in the successful consummation of those processes. The waste products of the human body merely serve as particularly proximate examples of this temporal relation; bodily excretions serve as daily reminders of how our bodies are getting on with things. There are countless other examples of how waste can be anticipated, intended or engineered that rarely bring about the ecstatic character of temporality expressed through Heidegger’s broken tool. Nevertheless, the “towards which” and “for which” that Heidegger argued is the hallmark of readiness-to-hand does not disappear when we anticipate waste; it simply becomes apprehended through its finitude, through the imminent generation of an occasion, an event felt to stand in the future. If an object is said to be ‘towards’ and ‘for’ a particular project, then this object must also participate in shaping how its failure or non-participation is experienced. The deployment of material things and the expectation of waste this deployment anticipates suggests the image of time that is being deployed. When objects are used, and an event of waste is said to mark the cessation of this use, then waste announces itself as an object of time.

We constantly harness the temporal measure that functioning things give us. Use-time is, as we saw in the previous chapter, a time distributed by calculated ends. Whether we drift towards these ends slowly and gently, like the protracted wearing of a door against its hinges, or experience the kind of rapid and visible end when burning wood for fuel, we can narrate the changing potential for a thing to do work and fulfil the projects designated to it. Although advertising slogans might try and convince us otherwise, manufacturers rarely produce or are capable of producing objects that ‘last forever’, we use many objects with their functional and temporal ends mutually supporting each another. Planned obsolescence is the notion that one designs and manufacturers equipment that has a finite use-time, it provides a useful example of how we expect things to waste.[17] The clothing, consumer electronics and motor vehicle industries are often singled out as being those that thrive on so-called ‘death-dating’.[18] But this attitude towards objects, which we expect to break over indeterminate but no less finite durations, mimics a more general relationship we have with the manipulation of things through time. When we acquire a hammer or a mobile phone (by gift or some other means) we expect that its functional life is limited and that it will eventually, despite our best attempts to ensure its long service, cease to operate within our aims and activities. Crucially, waste is not always a leftover of time, a preterite thing of subtle retrospection, but a thing with which to think through the future. We find the tardiness of waste transformed into an object of future memory, employed in what Derrida called the “future anterior” mode.[19] Waste-time operates as a powerful but insubordinate supplement to the time of use; the useful thing will become the waste that is the condition of our using. In this temporal respect, waste does not stand ‘outside’ or ‘external’ to our use of things, as orthodox economics tends to stress. Our care, the attention that we direct towards the thing is equally finite – we are concerned so long as the object operates within our projects and yet we retain understanding of use that makes immanent the time of waste. The rites and rituals of waste disposal, as varied and complex as our treatment of human remains, testify to how we measure the time expected in things according to their relation to the labour of the living.

Since the unexpected, surprising or arresting moment when objects fail to meet our expectations enjoys the drama of the unforeseen, and offers a chance to observe the suspended relations once implicated in an activity, it might be tempting to set this revelatory event against a more pragmatic, predetermined or anticipatory understanding of waste. But to anticipate waste has its own promise of revelation. Finding that one’s hopes or expectations have come to pass, that what once was useful can be made wasteful, can seem to verify all sorts of procedures, beliefs and durations. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the advent of waste has the potential to provoke lofty thoughts of the universe, God or the state of human nature, and the anticipation of waste plays an equally significant role in this provocation. Waste can be produced, both entirely unexpectedly and by our most fervent machinations, but the consequences of these events of or encounters with waste meet in how we understand waste objects to communicate what an object is, was and yet might be; their narrative potential. As was elaborated in Chapter 1, discarded objects, those things that no longer relate to our plans and projects, enter a polyvalent and suspended time; deferred, postponed and yet anticipating something else, something more, something yet to come. So although the condition of being waste can taint an object with a tardy sense of ‘already and not yet’, it does so by being available to participate in the fulfilment of time.

So far, I have suggested two rather generic modes by which waste emerges. The first saw the occurrence of waste as something that took us by surprise, revealing the discontinuous time we invest in an object as well as how objects give time to those that it acts with and upon. Time became ecstatic in this case, marking and measuring the transition of things from use into waste, from one collective relation to another, from inattention to concern. The second expression of waste, to be extended and developed in Chapter 7, acknowledges how this passing from use into disuse can also be wholly expected, engineered or observed over a period of time. In the former, the image of time is retrospectively realised; in the latter, the image of time is proleptically maintained. In both cases, the moment that waste is felt to have occurred, its power to articulate a new time or era, can herald the most momentous occasions – such as the arrival of a divine entity, the fall of an empire or the entropic decline of the universe. Of course, the unexpected or discontinuous and the anticipated or continuous effects of waste frequently mix with one another; what is anticipated has surprising effects, what is surprising becomes understood to have been inevitable. Acts of narration play a crucial role in legislating these mixtures, in organising how we articulate, trace and reproduce our judgements about these waste events, their composition, repercussions, and so on. The narrative interpretation of waste reaches across an implicit threshold that divides the time of use and the time of waste, as well as speculating what the object might become. The event – be it in the form of a Heideggerian interruption or a messianic anticipation of a temporal end – renders articulate the delicate division between the time of use and the time of waste. The polyvalent nature of waste’s temporality, harbouring past and future events and which occurs without notice or under the tension of our expectations, will be a recurrent problem throughout the thesis that follows. In chapters 4 and 5 we will see how this temporality of dispersal can displace writing, generating problems of material and semantic closure. In chapters 6 and 7 we will give greater attention to the consequences that the retrospective and anticipatory employment of waste-time has in our experience of architecture. Chapter 7 in particular will explore the future of waste in much greater detail. Throughout these chapters narrative, and the various kinds of scripts that it issues, proves crucial in disseminating the events of waste, shaping and explaining how it is made and how it relates to other times and places. It is narrative that accounts for and legislates between the continuities and discontinuities that we can recognise in waste, its rich mix of interruption and persistence.

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[1] Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects (Lanham, ML: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 162.

[2] Bill Brown, Critical Inquiry, 4.

[3] Julian Stallabrass, “Trash,” in The Object Reader, ed. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (London: Routledge, 2009), 416.

[4] John Scanlan, On Garbage, 43.

[5] Scanlan, On Garbage, 107.

[6] Ibid, 37.

[7] Jean-François Lyotard, Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 18; Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2006), 181.

[8] Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), 100

[9] Graham Harman, Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing (Chicago: Open Court, 2007), 63.

[10] Martin Heidegger, Being in Time, 97. n.1.

[11] Heidegger, Being in Time, 97.

[12] Heidegger, Being in Time, 98. An implicit version of this readiness-to-hand appeared earlier in Brown’s description of the object that functions, it describes the condition of a functioning thing prior to the revelation of its ‘thingliness’.

[13] Graham Harman, Tool-being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 21.

[14] Being in Time, 102–103.

[15] Ibid, 104.

[16] Ibid, 105.

[17] The term ‘planned obsolescence’ has a colourful history; see Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence (1932; Online, 2011), accessed 12th June 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org. Searching for a solution to the economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, London was an early advocate of planned obsolescence as a policy for growth and economic recovery; Vance Packard, The Waste Makers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961), gives a staunch critique of London’s analysis and the phenomena of planned obsolescence more generally.

[18] See Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006).

[19] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1976; Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1997), 5.

Rubbish – A Series of Events at Birkbeck College, University of London

“A philosophy that does not include the possibility of soothsaying from coffee grounds and cannot explicate it cannot be a true philosophy.” Walter Benjamin

Organised collectively by postgraduate students from Birkbeck, the London Consortium, Goldsmiths and Oxford for July 2011.  Free and open to all.

On Spaces and Value: seminar organised by the Space Reading Group, led by Lisa Mullen. Wednesday 27^th July, 6-730pm, Birkbeck, room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London.

Film double-bill: Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine, 2009)/The Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse) (Agnes Varda, 2000) – introduced by Holly Pester/Natalie Joelle and Will Viney.  Friday 29th July, 6-9pm, Birkbeck, B20, Malet Street/Torrington Square, Main Building, London.

Rubbish Symposium: Saturday 30^th July, 9am-5pm, Birkbeck, B20, Malet Street/Torrington Square, Main Building, London.

Keynote – Professor Steven Connor

Speakers -

Henderson Downing (Birkbeck)

Natalie Joelle (Birkbeck)

Lisa Mullen (Birkbeck)

Terri Mullholland (Oxford)

Daniel Rourke (Goldmsiths)

Rosemary Shirley (Sussex)

Jon Tee (Birkbeck)

Tony Venezia (Birkbeck)

Will Viney (London Consortium)

James Wilkes (London Consortium)

Chairs: Dr. Brian Dillon (Kent); Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck); Matt Wraith (London Consortium)

More tbc.

A map of Birkbeck’s buildings can be found here.

 

T. S. Eliot and the Writing of Waste

As the sculptural work of Cornelia Parker and Mark Dion has demonstrated, the inclusion or representation of waste reveals a key, self-reflexive quality of incorporating temporal redundancy within an artwork. The inclusion of waste in these works of art, and in the literary works considered below, foregrounds the positional nature of waste – striking distinct temporal relations between processes of deposition, composition and decomposition, motivating an engagement with the work that either acknowledges an explicit severance between times of use and non-use or plays upon their uncertain commingling. Arriving at this self-reflexive, propositional potential we might begin to comprehend the temporal positions at stake when identifying objects of waste in sculpture and literature.

Writing, as an object and a process that produces objects, can be said to give rise to various encounters with ‘textual waste’ and to an idea of waste as it is mediated by texts: on the one hand, a text can describe certain things, people and landscapes that have fallen from a temporally co-dependent relationship with human activity; on another, texts might suggest a compositional form of waste by alluding to or including the drafts, excisions or textual variants; and on a third, more ghostly limb, writing may also signify its status as an object, as a thing that might be discarded, a thing to be jettisoned. This chapter and the chapter that follows will approach these different yet intrinsically related stratum of textual waste to conclude that the significance of waste in literature cannot be reduced to one strata or another; all three play a fundamental role in how we evaluate objects within texts and how we take these things to function and perform within a literary work. For the reasons outlined in my introduction, waste plays an essential role in our attempts to apportion, organise and regulate the world of things; objects and events of waste help us to trace and retrace the passage of objects through time. Rather than focusing too much on the commonplace epithets ascribed to certain literary genres, which describe particular forms of writing as ‘trash’ or ‘pulp fiction’, the following chapters attend to the dynamic, propositional presence of redundant or exhausted things within canonical works of twentieth-century poetry and prose. Thus, the condition of waste is not considered an antithesis of ‘literature’, or writing more generally, but constitutes an essential aspect of textual formation.

Simply because a particular object has been singled out for examination, this should not exclude the formal, material or historical conditions by which that object entered a particular work of literature. The theoretical works that might guide us through this first level of textual waste, whereby objects of waste are described in a text, are relatively few in number. Francesco Orlando’s Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination attends to this dilemma by accumulating an extraordinary range of literary examples to construct a complex taxonomy of literary waste, a taxonomy that stabilises each example by comparison and normalisation. In doing so, Orlando provides a remarkable number of examples from European literature where particular kinds of objects come into view and, if it achieves nothing else, confirms the enduring presence of redundancy in literary works.

Orlando’s Taxonomy of Literary Waste, in Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination, 205.

In taking a rigorously structuralist approach to the idea of waste in literature, advancing through a taxonomy of things that “consist[s] only of binary oppositions” and “terminal contrar[ies]”, Orlando argues that literary works can confirm and conform to certain set a priori categories.[1] This matrix orders types of waste according to whether the objects described have been collectively or individually perceived, whether they appear within a natural or supernatural environment, whether they form a significant or peripheral role in the narrative, can be considered wrought or raw.[2] As a taxonomy that attempts to absorb every possible form of literary waste, the scheme assumes an air of infallibility; should Orlando’s terms be unable to account for a particular obsolete thing then the failure highlights a flaw in text concerned; where these categories cannot be satisfactorily applied, “the substance of the texts is insufficient”.[3] The images of waste that we might encounter in works of literature are to be resolved and categorised within a predetermined series of categorical bifurcations; if they cannot be categorised in this way then they cannot be considered objects of waste.

The peculiar permanence that Orlando gives the waste he reads relies almost exclusively upon the stasis and reliability of what he calls the “nonfunctional”, a term that we have already rendered problematic in various ways. In my view, concepts of waste do not simply stand in opposition to concepts of use but represent a specific relation to or augmentation of the time we make through things. So, when Orlando argues that “What is used, what is needed, what serves a purpose, what is useful: these are the contraries of those things whose images we are studying”[4], he seeks to separate his study from the categorical volatility that makes waste a fundamentally reversible condition. And Orlando overlooks one of the central paradoxes of waste: in works of literature, images of waste are frequently needed, purposeful and useful for communicating a whole range of meanings. We are left to wonder about the usefulness of including images of waste, the author’s intentions in mobilising the idea of waste in their work and the various impressions available that might not be easily termed ‘collective’ or ‘individual’, ‘pertinent’ or ‘impertinent’, ‘raw’ or ‘wrought’ but might, in fact, comprise combinations of some, none or all of those terms. Textual waste is neither absolutely terminal nor absolutely contrary to the useful time that renders it articulate. And objects of waste do not necessarily herald a time of absolute or unequivocal nonfunctionality – what is discarded by one group or individual might be instrumental to another, things might change their function over time by becoming discarded, reused or recycled. And, at a less pragmatic and more conceptual level, the temporal arrangement by which waste comes into being must reconcile the use that has passed and make the idea of use present at precisely the moment where it is said to have dissolved. In other words, we cannot take for granted a polarisation between use and waste, but must, instead, seek to understand the transient co-dependence and cross-contamination of these terms. This is as true when we confront works of sculpture and literature as it is when we confront cigarette ends found in the gutter or the refuse found at a landfill.

Whilst we have discovered some flaws with one of the few works of literary criticism that has focused on the subject of waste in literature, it provides a useful departure for what follows. In response to Orlando’s attempts, I would like to suggest that when approaching the subject of waste in literature it is a mistake to isolate the object of description from the objects that make that descriptive act possible, i.e. the inevitable waste that accompanies acts of inscription and reading. The making of texts involves the production of waste, as well as references to it – a waste in both form and in content. One of the more compelling effects of waste as it is transcribed into textual forms is its capacity “simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction.”[5] This metafictional potential encourages a relay between the various methods of making things, whether decaying, dissolving or going to waste, and the innumerable things that appear before us, either on the page or screen. Just as waste facilitated an analysis of productive destruction, decay and recovery that were felt to be intrinsic to the artistic practice of Parker and Dion, so we should try to understand the relationship between the textual descriptions of waste and the qualitative act of producing a thing called a ‘text’; that is to say, we should look to how waste is not simply a passive and inactive species of object, innocently tucked into works of literature for the pleasure of those with a penchant for the redundant, but as an idea that informs the construction, consumption and deconstruction of literature more broadly. These are some of the principles and ambitions that motivate the criticism below, loosening some of the burden of literary variety for the sake of a more thoroughgoing theory of how waste and writing intersect. If one assumes that literature must make recourse to a material text, then the value of waste in literature resides in the relationship between its content and the textual medium.

The following chapters concentrate on the work of just two writers, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, in order to exemplify a number of pertinent areas where ideas of ‘waste’ and ‘literature’ intersect. In restricting myself to a narrow range of authors I hope to give greater room to the theoretical implications of the thesis as a whole and, in particular, to explore the ways in which we both compose and decompose meaning when assessing the effects of waste in and upon the literary. What might be lost in not highlighting the importance of discarded things in the work of Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne, Shelley, Keats and Dickens, as well as the modern and the contemporary writers with whom the concept of waste can be readily associated,[6] might be compensated by a more thorough-going and comprehensive analysis of how waste converses with the idea of the literary, the images that are created and the textual things that mediate their potential.

As a literature that contemplates the leftovers of literature, the poetry of T. S. Eliot has gained some of its distinction through the identification and mobilisation of waste, both as an object of writing and a critical concept used to interpret that writing. At an immediate level, Eliot’s poetry is composed of substances spent, discards of image and text that seem to at once achieve and to resist the condition of absolute redundancy; there seems no end “To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage” (CPP 186).[7] But it is not simply a literature dominated by images of discarded things, nor is it simply a literature about discarded things, but a literature that seems uncannily aware of what remains of its composition, a poetics that positions Eliot’s work among the residues of his texts and countless others. And, whilst this poetics of residua absorbs within it a whole range of modernist mantras – to ‘make it new’ and to ‘make it difficult’[8] – it keenly pursues one other, less observed imperative: to ‘make it waste.’ This final imperative, though rarely acknowledged and partially achieved, accounts for the difficulty of Eliot’s writing as a productive and reflexive effect of wasted words.

We will not begin where one might expect but, instead, with a notebook, a notebook of early poems and poetic fragments that was sold by Eliot to the patron and collector John Quinn in 1922, as replete with vacant spaces as The Waste Land and an important source for that work. For many years after Quinn’s death in 1924 it was thought that this notebook had been lost or destroyed. There were a number of instances when Eliot expressed his opinion of this work. The first occurs just a few months before the publication of The Waste Land, when Eliot sent Quinn the notebook: “You will find a great many sets of verse which have never been printed and which I am sure you will agree never ought to be printed, and in putting them in your hands, I beg you fervently to keep them to yourself and see they are never printed.”[9] In a letter dated 28th July 1963, Eliot refers to the contents of this missing notebook as “unpublished and unpublishable”[10] and, in another letter to Daniel Woodward a year later, “I cannot feel altogether sorry that this [typescript] and the notebook have disappeared. The unpublished poems in the notebook were not worth publishing.”[11] These poems were not lost, however, but tucked away in a box and later bought by the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 1958. Their acquisition was announced to the general public ten years later, on the 25th October 1968.[12] Access to these works was limited until in 1996, when they were published as the collection Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 and for the first time scholars interested in Eliot’s notebook were permitted to take direct quotations from it. This might seem an unremarkable case of emancipated juvenilia; work the author had hoped would remain a unique and private thing emerging into the light of public scrutiny. But the notebook’s contents and unpublished status, cancellation and subsequent publication, prove highly relevant to our consideration of textual, technical and material value. Its passage from manuscript draft to published work shows an alternative trajectory to The Waste Land, which was published in The Criterion, The Dial and as a book in 1922, but also as manuscript facsimiles in 1971. We will have time to consider what effect the publication of The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Typescript of the Original Drafts did for the understanding of that poem, but not before attending to the dynamic waste content of Inventions of the March Hare.

Discarded Inventions: Inscription on Eliot’s First Flyleaf

The notebook’s title represents a synecdoche for the changing fortunes of its contents. Inscribed “INVENTIONS OF THE MARCH HARE” on the first flyleaf, Eliot later cancelled out these words by replacing them on the front free endpaper with, “COMPLETE POEMS OF / T. S. Eliot” alongside a dedication to Jean Verdenal and an epigraph taken from Dante. Comparing Eliot’s habits in naming and dedicating his work, Christopher Ricks makes the case that Eliot probably changed the title when he knew that the contents of the notebook were to go unpublished, “between 1920 and 1925 […] when he sold it to Quinn in 1922.”[13] Double-named, no-named, one can only wonder whether Eliot deleted the former title and added the latter because he knew that ‘The Complete Poems’ was an unpublishable title for an undesirable publication. His notebook did not include the poem that had made him famous and the notebook’s fragmentary, protean correspondence to his later, published work would show it to be wholly incomplete; an embarrassing work in progress. No doubt conscious of how an act of naming can help legitimise a new publication, Ricks recovers and reinstates the cancelled title, cancelling Eliot’s cancellation. The title, ‘Inventions of the March Hare’, according to Ricks, is “likely to be less inappropriate than any other [title], as memorable, and as figuring in TSE’s correspondence.”[14] Such editorial interventions into the work of a dead writer are certainly not unusual and the cancellation of words, phrases and whole passages from a text are to be expected in a notebook to which time was given to “visions and revisions”. But what seems telling about the title and its sardonic ghost intimates the temporal relation between invention and completion, between the sketches discarded as “unpublishable” and the apparent closure of a ‘complete’ work, not to mention the figures of waste that Eliot so regularly employs to reflect how his work has been composed, what it describes and the material things it requires to make that process of composition and description possible.

During an interview in 1959 Eliot would observe, “As a rule, with me an unfinished thing is a thing that might as well be rubbed out. It’s better, if there’s something good in it that I might make use of it elsewhere, to leave it at the back of my mind than on paper in a drawer. If I leave it in a drawer it remains the same thing but if it’s in the memory it becomes transformed into something else.”[15] As a rule, things are rarely so simple. The poems in Inventions of the March Hare are works that have been rubbed out, placed in a drawer and transformed into something else; they reflect a number of possible material outcomes. But their presence in the wider body of Eliot’s writings, as both a source and another conclusion to the works published in his lifetime, means that being left at the back of drawer means that a work can still be available for reuse; those poems that were never published by Eliot became important sources for his published work. It would seem that, as time passes, the distinctions between rubbing out, remembering or discarding draft material prove far from absolute, especially when it comes to the detritus that Eliot employs in his early poems. ‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’ and ‘Second Caprice in North Cambridge’ are both manuscripts written in blue ink, composed in November 1909 and reproduced in typescript for Inventions of the March Hare:

‘First Caprice in North Cambridge’

A street-piano, garrulous and frail;
The yellow evening flung against the panes
Of dirty windows: and in distant strains
Of children’s voices, ended in a wail.

Bottles and broken glass,                                                  5
Trampled mud and grass;
A heap of broken barrows;
And a crowd of tattered sparrows
Delve in the gutter with sordid patience.
Oh, these minor considerations! . . . . .                            10

                                                                                         (IMH, 5)

Readers familiar with the work that was published during Eliot’s lifetime will recognise a number of tropes and images, many of which relate to images of waste. Compare “The yellow evening flung against the panes” (2) with the “yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes” found in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (CPP, 13), or “Bottles and broken glass, / Trampled mud and grass” (5–6) with the “Our dried voices [...] As wind in dry grass / or rats’ feet over broken glass” found in The Hollow Men (CPP, 83). Finally, and most pertinent to this study, “A heap of broken barrows” resonates with and anticipates one of the most cited lines from The Waste Land: “A heap of broken images” (I.22).[16] Inventions of the March Hare is full of these whispers and sketches, migratory phrases that we can recognise as being put to use “elsewhere”. That it should be images of waste that brings this pattern of use, reuse and rubbing out to light only seems to intensify certain compositional processes of textual variation, revision and self-reference. Firstly, the appearance of “A heap of broken barrows” shows that, thirteen years prior to the publication of The Waste Land, Eliot was taking serious interest in the capacity of waste to figure semantic and visual fragmentation. Secondly, the “broken barrows” of ‘First Caprice’, which might signify animal, tumuli or tool, carries a productive uncertainty that feels at odds with the reparative promise of Eliot’s end-rhymes (glass/grass, barrows/sparrows), foretelling a tension between lyric enclosure and figurative multiplicity that can be readily traced into The Waste Land and the works that followed. And it is important to note how the catalogue of waste found in ‘First Caprice’, an inventory of muddy and discarded matter, presses against a sense of formal poetic containment. It is the specificity of waste that makes this not just a formal or semantic complexity but a lingering temporal one too – these frail, dirty, broken, trampled things remain to be considered, to be reworked, reused and open to renewed assessment. Bringing a deliberate and formal momentum to the gutter, the final lines are both a statement and summary of minor tone and reflect the temporal openness of waste, a reflexive declaration of provisional exhaustion. The final ellipsis marks both the failure to say more and the promise that these images will continue to reverberate and reappear, as they do so in Eliot’s next caprice:

‘Second Caprice in North Cambridge’

The charm of vacant lots!
The helpless fields that lie
Sinister, sterile and blind –
Entreat the eye and rack the mind,
Demand your pity.                                                     5
With ashes and tins in piles,
Shattered bricks and tiles
And the débris of the city.

Far from our definitionAnd our aesthetic laws    10
Let us pause.
With these fields that hold and rack the brain
(What: again?)
With an unexpected charm
And an unexpected repose                                         15
On an evening in December
Under a sunset yellow and rose.

                                                                                           (IMH, 15)

Whilst textual scholars such as Lyndall Gordon have argued that Eliot began writing the early fragments of The Waste Land in 1914, reading the detritus of Inventions of the March Hare reveals how Eliot’s interest in images of waste can be found scattered throughout his earlier work.[17] And it is the relentless and recurrent aspects of waste, the temporal disjunctures that makes it an actively redundant thing, which allows us to trace its passage through Eliot’s writing and expand the traditional, historical horizons given to the genesis of his later works. Waste is encountered as a strange and compelling object, with “unexpected charm” (14) these “vacant lots” (1), scattered with broken bricks and tiles, might demand pity but they also “entreat the eye and rack the mind” (4) and give pause to the conventions of philosophic discourse. Eliot produces this sense of surprise and enchantment through a canny circularity of phrase and a rhyming self-reproach, “With these fields that hold and rack the brain / (What: again?)” (12–13). Here is matter that persists in the mind in order to be taken up again in other circumstances, matter for which the future is open and without obvious closure. In the description of these vacant lots lies an involuntary aspect of Eliot’s theory of composition and memory that we noted earlier; the incomplete, vacant contents of his writing are used to signify the compulsion to write, the compulsion to respond to the salient intellectual and poetic ‘demands’ of waste. The “unfinished thing” causes a problem both materially and mentally for Eliot, prompting him to glean the unfinished object for anything that might be used again in another form. “It might as well be rubbed out”, if it is to be reused it must be left “at the back of my mind.” The failure of the draft, its incompletion makes it available for reuse, recollection and permutation; in this openness comes the force to hold and rack the mind.

The repetitions of waste in Eliot are twofold, especially when reading Inventions of the March Hare: these poems describe the outward performance of gleaning wastes for their poetic effects whilst giving an implicit, reflexive performance of drafting, discarding and retaining ideas for subsequent use. In what will be a key and revisited scene, the waste land will never be entirely “Sinister, sterile and blind” (3) but also the scene of contemplation, meditation and unforeseen light, a waste land that holds and racks the mind in a way that will secure its reprise in later works. Both with respect to the individual poem and within the context of Eliot’s wider oeuvre, ‘Second Caprice in North Cambridge’ displays a waste for repeated viewing and, typical of Eliot, one that cannot be easily understood as the ‘source’ for later work since it contains a passage written by another writer. It is, in this respect, at the intersection of a huge variety of textual wastes, both forwards and backwards in time. Note the tins, piles, vacant lots and rosiness found in Henry James’ The Bostonians:

the red sunsets of winter [...] a collective impression of the meanness of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles [...] loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness.[18]

These are images of animated desolation to which Eliot will again turn in when drafting ‘Preludes’ in his Inventions notebook; a poem first drafted eleven months after his first and second caprice and containing the mutated, discarded scraps, lots and images we found in those poems.[19] In section I of ‘Preludes’, gusts of wind wrap “grimy scraps / Of withered leaves about your feet / And newspapers from vacant lots” (IMH, I.5–8), section III speaks of “a thousand sordid images” (IMH III.27) and “the sparrows in the gutters” (IMH III.32), whilst section IV will conclude with the thought that “worlds revolve like ancient women / gathering fuel in vacant lots” (IMH IV.54–55). All these images of waste and redundancy we can find in earlier work, proving that Eliot’s deployment of waste occurs not by casual accident but by a discontinuous yet traceable migration from draft to draft, notebook to notebook to publication; by trial and repetition these images become animate, move, migrate and attain mutation in their multiplicity. It is in the publication of ‘Preludes’, first in Wyndham Lewis’ Blast (July 1915) and then as part of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), that all these images of waste become publicly distilled and consumed, meanwhile, the discarded caprices remain left in a drawer and, later, secreted in the collections of the New York Public Library until their publication by Harcourt in 1996. When Eliot argues that something kept in the mind is more likely to be reused elsewhere this does not detract from the fact that we can trace this process of reuse through the trail of discarded material left behind, the drawer can be reopened and patterns of use can be described through acts of disposal.

We must revisit, as Eliot did, the value of these vacant lots: the phrase alludes to spaces and objects to be bought, sold and resold, to the actual landscapes of Boston described by Henry James, to the poems that compose Inventions of the March Hare. It might be easy to dismiss Eliot’s vacant lots as minor stanzas within the Eliot estate. Jayme Stayer has been keen to keep these poems in the drawer that Eliot cast them into. Stayer argues that the poems of Inventions of the March Hare, and the ‘Caprice’ poems in particular, show an “insecurity on the poet’s part as to whether or not his new-found tools are working […] the images of sordidness cannot be trusted to do the work he intends.”[20] Finding that various rhetorical and technical aspects of these poems to be “unconvincing”, “forced” or “derivative”, Stayer concludes that the notebook prepared Eliot for “the public stage of poetry” but is full of inferior and unfinished works.[21] But Stayer seems to degrade the potential of juvenilia or manuscript notebooks, reinforcing the rarity and singularity of the published and ‘definitive’ work over and above all the fascinating insights that draft material can provide. Failing to account for the way in which Inventions of the March Hare has, indeed, found publication, Stayer emphasises the oppositional status between draft and publication and, by employing the uncertain images of sordidness that he found so unsatisfactory:

The chaff of the notebook – its rhetorical uncertainties, self–defeating gestures, and pornographic excrescences – Eliot will sweep away, and to the public he will present the wheat that is left over: the telling allusions, hallucinatory squalor, transcendent intimations, muted suffering, eclectic fear, bilious ennui, all of it spoken, sung, or growled in virtuosic registers of irony, obliquity, deadpan, and directness.[22]

As our brief analysis of waste in the early work of Eliot has shown, Inventions of the March Hare is a vacant lot from which critics might gather their fuel. If there is such a thing as ‘chaff’ then it cannot be swept away as easily as Stayer or, perhaps, Eliot would like us to believe. This is partly due to the images of waste that are retained, reworked, refashioned and made to reverberate in more popular or accessible poems, images that describe both the transitory contents of drafts and their base materiality. It is the provisional and temporary nature of writing waste and creating the waste of writing that allows this matter to spill into and inhabit a text assumed to be free of its effects.

Although modern manuscript studies frequently stresses the difference between published and unpublished versions of the text, to note changes in meaning, structure or effect, and often to reinforce a calculating and taxonomic separation between draft and publication, our brief analysis of Eliot’s wasted revisions issues certain textual and interpretative challenges that complicate this separation. Tracing Eliot’s preoccupation with waste from around the time that the ‘Caprice’ poems were written, through to, as is our aim, the publication and critical reception of The Waste Land, will lead us to question the exclusive and independent status of the ‘published’ or ‘complete’ work. When Eliot said that the “unpublished poems in the notebook were not worth publishing”, he might be said to overlook how his published poems frequently contained the poetic residues of those unpublished drafts and that publishing one version and not another must account for their process of validation. Such a view must lead us to confront the way in which unpublished and published materials penetrate and contaminate one another, especially when ‘unpublished’ drafts are then made available as published facsimiles or typescripts. Just as other chapters have been keen to stress that there can be no such thing as an absolute form of waste, just the contingent separation of use and waste in time, so it is that manuscript or draft material cannot be expected to remain inert when interpreting works of literature. Such a view of writing means that we can supplement some views about literary composition and the writing of The Waste Land. The first concerns the ‘scene of writing’ and the stories told regarding literary manufacture. For example, it is commonly held that Eliot struggled and struggled with The Waste Land until finally, and with a lot of help from Ezra Pound, the work came together in the miraculous summer of 1922. Some have suggested that Eliot conjured the poem from nothing; he “found himself” writes Louis Menard, “with nothing to construct a poem on”.^[23] But by tracing the figure and figuration of waste, the discarded scraps and drafts that preceded The Waste Land and the phrases, images and atmospheres they conjure, we can show that the construction of the poem can be found in the deconstructed wastes of earlier works. In other words, we can challenge where the composition of The Waste Land is said to have begun, an important point for a poem which throws doubt over its functional ends and beginnings. The second commonly held belief that we can supplement is the idea that The Waste Land should be understood primarily as an exchange between the text and the intertexts it alludes to and transforms, as a competitive game between Eliot and the Western canon. Whilst this intertexuality is no doubt a fundamental and distinctive aspect of Eliot’s poetic method, it overlooks the intratextual aspect of his work. That is, the correspondences established between the various kinds of writing he has authored and the sedimentation and redundancy required to shore up his work. This proves an important compositional dynamic of hoarding, storage and reuse. As Richard Badenhausen observes, “[Eliot] often scribbled fragments of verse and then hoarded them for a later time when they might blossom into larger works or be inserted into another text.”[25] The compositional and interpretative importance of so-called ‘intratexuality’ will help us appreciate not just the scene of writing but the multiple scenes of writing and rewriting, unearthing an author’s compositional relation to the texts of others and their own, both published and unpublished.

[...]

---

[1] Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination: Ruins, Relics, Rarities, Rubbish, Uninhabited Places and Hidden Treasure, trans. Gabriel Philas, Daniel Seidel and Alessandra Grego (New Haven: Yale UP, 2006) 79, 102.

[2] For Orlando’s schematic in full, see Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects in the Literary Imagination 205.

[3] Francesco Orlando, Obsolete Objects 207.

[4] Orlando, Obsolete Objects 102.

[5] Patricia Waugh, Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984; London: Routledge, 1996) 6.

[6] See Susan Cahill, Emma Hegarty and Emilie Morin, ed, SubStance 116, 37: 2, 2008.

[7] These and subsequent references are taken from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1963; London: Faber, 1969). Brief quotations will be cited as CPP with page references, additional line numbers accompany more extensive quotation.

[8] These are the mantras suggested by Sean Latham, Joyce’s Modernism (Dublin: National Library of Ireland, 2004) 1–3.

[9] T.S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume I 1898–1922, ed. John Haffenden (London: Faber, 2009) 749.

[10] Quoted in B. L. Reid, The Man from New York: John Quinn and His Friends ([…], 1968), 540.

[11] Daniel H. Woodward, Notes on the Publishing History and Text of The Waste Land (Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, lviii, 1964) 268.

[12] See Christopher Ricks, “Preface”, in Inventions of the March Hare, ed. Christopher Ricks (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1996) xiii. [xi–xxxiii]

[13] Christopher Ricks, Inventions of the March Hare (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1996) 4.

[14] Ricks, Inventions 5.

[15] T. S. Eliot, “T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1” Interviewed by Donald Hall, 1959. Online: <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4738/the-art-of-poetry-no-1-t-s-eliot>. Accessed 2nd October 2010.

[16] Quotations from The Waste Land are from the 1922 edition, reprinted in T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Typescript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1971) 133–149.

[17] Lyndall Gordon, “The Waste Land Manuscript”, American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Jan., 1974), pp. 557-570. John T. Mayer is one of the few critics to have traced the relations between the Inventions notebook and The Waste Land but makes no mention of waste, see John T. Mayer, “The Waste Land and Eliot’s Poetry Notebook”, in T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, ed. Ronald Bush (Cambridge: CUP, 1991) 67–90, esp. 72 .

[18] Henry James, The Bostonians, ed. R. D. Gooder (1886; Oxford: OUP, 1984) 167, 168.

[19] See ‘[Preludes]’, Inventions of a March Hare, 334–337.

[20] Jayme Stayer, “In Search of the Early Eliot: Inventions of the March Hare” in David E. Chintz ed., A Companion to T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) 117. [107–119]

[21] Jayme Stayer, “In Search of the Early Eliot” 117, 188.

[22] Stayer, 188.

[23] Louis Menard, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, Second Edition (Oxford: OUP, 2007) 76.

[25] Richard Badenhausen, T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration (Cambridge: CUP, 2004) 75.

On the Etymologies of Waste

It is worth recalling the etymology of the word ‘waste’ and its relationship to ideas of the divine, the human and the land. We take the word ‘waste’ from vastus, giving it the same Latin root as the word ‘vast’ and meaning a space that is void, immense or enormous. The vast etymology of waste takes in its vacant neighbours, vanus and vaccus, and includes the verb vasto, “to make empty or vacant, to leave unattended or uninhibited, to desert”.[1] Waste is both an a priori emptiness and a thing that has become empty: it is both a pre-exiting desert and a space that was once but is no longer inhabited. It is important to stress the landed nature of this conception of waste as well as its temporal and causal flexibility. The earliest uses of the word invariably denote an enormous and empty sense of a depopulated landscape, “uninhabited (or sparsely inhabited) and uncultivated country; a wild and desolate region, a desert, wilderness.”[2] The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the first recorded use of the word ‘waste’ can be found in the Trinity College Homilies, written in the first half of the twelfth century: “Ac se[ò]en hie henen wendend atlai pai lond unwend and bicam waste, and was roted oueral and swo bicam wildernesse.”[3] It appears that the earliest uses of ‘waste’ describe any large or uninhabited space, spaces where humans had either left uninhabited, literarily land that had “bicam waste” or land where humans could not inhabit such as deserts, seascapes or mountain ranges. Through words like ‘devastation’ we see one concept of waste, as destroyed or depleted material, conjoin with its vast etymological root, a space in which humans cannot or can no longer subsist, a space where their relation to the environment overwhelms utilitarian exchange. What is important is the relationship struck between land and the human capacity to cultivate and make that land a productive place in which to dwell. This landed notion of waste exceeds more modern associations with the commodity form, environmental depletion, financial excess or bodily excreta, carrying with it broader intimations of stewardship, scale, shelter and time. Moreover, imbued in the concept of waste that originates from these Latin and Medieval roots is a problem of waste’s relationship to time, a time codified by how, if and when humans might use something and the apparent emptiness, the ‘nothing’ that characterises all that falls beyond human control. These are spaces that gain definition from the productive time that they cannot perform. Put another way, waste is a condition that which does not coincide with the time of human activity.

Our etymological excursions have led to a somewhat Biblical cause. Waste is not only something created by humans but is something primeval, a condition that occurs prior and in distinction to the human, a condition that separates the sacred and the profane. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, waste forms the condition by which humanity can come to be and take ownership of its environment, it is the condition that precedes a “heaven[ly] benediction”. This is something to which King Lear appears all too aware when, in response to Cordelia’s refusal to accept the gift of his land, he expounds the classical maxim ex nihilo nihil fit, “Nothing will come of nothing” (F.1.1.88). In doing so, he recalls how God’s creation and redistribution of the earth’s resources was founded upon a formless void that is described in the Book of Genesis. Lear’s act of division parallels God’s intervention, both are done in distinction to and against a sense of ‘nothingness’. From what kind of ‘something’ does God create? Many Biblical scholars continue to translate the formless, primeval vacuum that precedes God’s division of earth from sea as a state of waste. Genesis 1:2 can and has been translated, “And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep: and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”[4] Variants suggest that the earth was “without form or void”[5] or was “formless and empty”[6] but, semantically and etymologically, all conclude the original state of the earth prior to God’s intervention was one dominated by the immense and uninhabitable conception of waste that medieval uses of the word upheld: “a wild and desolate region, a desert, wilderness.” This variation is born out of the peculiar and rather idiomatic Hebrew expression, ּובהוּ תהו tohû wābohû, which Judaic scripture describes the condition of the earth in this ambiguous and desolate condition. The expression tohû wābohû is of obscure providence, appearing at just two other occasions in Judaic scripture (the others are Jeremiah 4:23 and Isaiah 34:11, both of which effectively return the earth to Gen 1:2). There remains considerable debate about how to interpret and translate tohû wābohû but, following David Tsumura, we may make the following distinction: tohû means a “desert” or “waste land” and bohû meaning “empty” or “uninhabited place”. Comparing the twenty other occasions that tohû appears in the Old Testament, Tsumura concludes that tohû wābohû should be understood as “unproductive and uninhabited”.[7] For Albert Barnes this amounts to “an absence of all that can furnish or people the land” and Keil and Delitzsch gloss that, “The coming earth was at first waste and desolate, a formless, lifeless mass”.[8] The state of the earth prior to God’s intervention has been considered, therefore, to be one of mingled confusion, a noisy and desolate plane of water that can produce nothing.

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[1] See Charles Lewis and Charles Short (eds.) A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (1879; Oxford: Clarendon, 1945).

[2] The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition. 1989.

[3] Quoted in ibid.

[4] S. R. Driver, The Book of Genesis (1904; London: Methuen, 1948). Others have “a formless waste”, see E. A. Speiser, The Anchor Bible: Genesis (New York: Doubleday, 1983) 3.

[5] Revised Standard Version

[6] New International Version

[7] David Toshio Tsumura, The Earth and the Waters in Genesis 1 and 2: A Linguistic Investigation (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989) 31, 42.

[8] Albert Barnes, Notes on the Bible, Carl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1866) vol. 1, 48.

Patrick Keiller – Robinson in Ruins

 

22nd November, update: Brian Dillon writes.