Notes on waste

Slavoj Zizek on waste in "Examined Life"

"One way of considering ruins and their contents...is as waste. According to this notion, in the ruin all objects are equal, none assigned higher values than others, because they are all categorised as trash. They are useless and worn out, and therefore possess no value and can be, indeed ought to be, discarded... The object's abrupt loss of the magic of commodity - that it is a self-evident, seperate thing of worth and value - seems to confirm Stallabrass's observation 'commodities, despite all their tricks, are just stuff'... Accordingly, waste materials offer evidence for a radical critique of the myth of universal progress driven by the supposedly innovative power of capitalism and technology. For by their presence they rudely display the 'extreme temporal attenuation' whereby industrial techniques and commodities attain venerable status, and fashion produces instant obsolescence, so that the recent past becomes ancient history. Here we are faced with the converse of an ordering modernity in which the norm is for the 'denunciation of any form of fixity in favour of permanent flux'."

Tim Edensor in "Industrial Ruins - Space Aesthetics and Materiality" p 100-101