The Discard Studies Compendium is a list of critical key terms. In the past few years there has been both a resurgence of approaches to studying waste and wasting as well as an interest in the potential of waste to build interdisciplinary bridges of relevance to pressing questions of our time.
This list is critical in the sense that it comes out of methods in the humanities and social sciences that contextualize the problems and systems that are not readily apparent to the invested but casual observer. Our task is to trouble the assumptions, premises and popular mythologies of waste. Waste and pollution are the material externalities of complex cultural, economic, and political systems, and solutions need to address these wider systems rather than fall to technological or moral fixes that deal with symptoms rather than origins of problems.
This online version of the Compendium is the initial step of a larger project that aims to create a print version with a comprehensive list of terms. The greyed out terms in the chart are a small sample of an expanded future list.
The Discard Studies Compendium is a project by Max Liboiron, Michele Acuto, and Robin Nagle. This project is currenlty on hold.
Abjection describes a social and psychological process by which things like garbage, sewage, corpses and rotting food elicit powerful emotional responses like horror and disgust. While abjection theory has been used in various ways across the social sciences and humanities, it emerges from the psychoanalytic work of Julia Kristeva.
Drawing on a seminal text in Discard Studies, Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966), Julia Kristeva’s foundational book The Powers of Horror (1982) develops the theory of abjection through literary, psychoanalytic, and anthropological works. Furthering the insight of Douglas that dirt is not an essential characteristic of objects but is produced through its ambiguity and its subsequent inability to be assimilated into existing socio-cultural categories and systems, Kristeva explains how the constant process of keeping the unclassifiable at bay is a productive act. Abjection is therefore caught in up in the production of the boundaries of peoples’ bodies, societal norms, and the self. In that way, abjection is set in motion whenever we try to make meaning of the world and ourselves. Thus, the abject resides in the liminal space between that which is expressible through language and that which radically resists expression. Studying waste through abjection means beingcognizant of the ways in which something beyond meaning (the extra discursive) is continually influential in how we make meaning. This uneasy relationship often causes meaning to break down; in this break down, the fragility of normative orders are exposed.
As such, while abject objects, populations, and practices are commonly thought of as absolutely excluded from normative and sanitized orderings of the body, the household, the city, and the nation, theorists of abjection point to the impossibility of permanently excluding the abject (Sibley 2005; McClintock 1995; Moore 2009; Popke 2001). Abjection theorists ask how that which we attempt to radically exclude constantly returns. This continual insistence of the abject is not just about negation but comes to be a productive process through which prohibitions, taboos, and boundaries are established or contested: it defines the contours of the body and the body politic. The defining quality of the abject, then, is not an essential trait that elicits feelings of disgust or horror, but rather anything that muddles normative borders and divisions and thus threatens a breakdown in conventional or dichotomous ways of making meaning of the world.
Geographers and other social scientists studying waste and its relation to issues of social and environmental justice have used abjection to consider how objects, people, and practices are tagged as dirty and subsequently marginalized (Moore 2009). In studies of garbage, discards, or any kind of material waste, abjection is often used to understand how these things become the mediators of socio-cultural and spatial inclusions, exclusions, and difference. For example, in a study of waste in Oaxaca, Mexico, geographer, Sarah Moore shows how residents of a neglected neighborhood blocked flows of trash to draw attention to their socio-spatial exclusions and resulting inequality (Moore 2008).
The abject, though, is not limited to objects. Other studies have shown how people and practices can also be understood through abjection (Valentine 1998). Populations that deal with waste are tagged as dirty through their material association with trash (scavengers, trash collectors, recycler) (Gidwani and Reddy 2011). Populations can be marked as abject through their metonymic, metaphorical or other symbolic associations with dirt or filth (the poor, sex workers, queer populations; ethnic, religious or racial minorities). This shows how abjection functions through existing symbolic structures like imagined vectors of contagion (Moore 2009; McClintock 1995).
Social scientists and humanities scholars examining questions of inequality and social justice find a productive focus on the tenuous in-betweens and breakdowns of meaning, but abjection is, again, not limited to these realms (Miller 1997). Kristeva also shows how abjection functions in literature and art; through what she labels as “abject art”, Kristeva specifically highlights how some art forms relying on disgust and horror in the face of wasted objects, exposed bodies, and filthy practices work with a deep understanding of how abjection functions. While the abject art movement (encompassing the works of Andre Serrano, Valie Export, and Hannah Wilke) exhibits marked differences with contemporary trash art and trash artists, they share the aim of muddling the boundaries between art and trash, the sublime and the disgusting.
Abjection allows those who work closely with trash, whatever their field, to understand it as an object that exists in liminal spaces of utmost importance, namely, the body, the household, the city, and the nation. Whether mediating questions of social justice and marginalization (Moore 2009) or questions of aesthetics (in the case of abject art), abjection has centered trash as a mediator, instigator and threat to traditional ways of understanding the world.Back to list of terms
References:
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo. New York: Routledge.
Gidwani, V. and Reddy, R.N. (2011). The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode 43: 1625-1658.
Kristeva, J. and Roudiez, L. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press.
McClintock, A. (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, gender, and sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
Miller, W.I. (1997). The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Moore, S.A. (2009). The Excess of Modernity: Garbage Politics in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Professional Geographer 61: 426-437.
Moore, S.A. (2008). The politics of garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico. Society and Natural Resources: An International Journal 21: 597-610.