Virtual Roundtable
This roundtable discussion is taking place via email. The structure of these encounters have been influenced by Elizabeth Freeman’s ‘‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities, a round table discussion” which has been a great source of inspiration in both structural and theoretical terms.
The exchange begins in October 2022 and involves a group of practitioners who took part in the Working With Waste workshops in Berlin 2022. The group will be emailed in clusters and send their remarks back to me to be collated and sent on to the next cluster for a total of 3 rounds of comments. From there I will weave the responses into a conversation making small edits for the sake of continuity.
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October 2022
Lucy Beech: I sat recently in a Berliner Wasserbetriebe trailer (Berlin Water Company) on a street in the suburbs of Spandau, Berlin during my time shadowing a drain inspection camera technician. As I watched him maneuver the robot camera through what he assured me was one of the older, dirtier drains of the neighborhood carrying waste water away from someone's home I reflected on the intricacies of this service/value chain of waste management. Before the invention of this subterraneous technology that unfolded in front of our robots eyes (visible via one of the many screens banked up in the darkness of the back of van) the practice of collecting undiluted ‘night soil’ was undertaken by hand. After dark, fecal sludge unloaded by 'Salvagers' from underground cesspools, outhouses, backdoor pail closets or septic tanks to be transformed into fertiliser. Human waste has been recycled in China since at least 500 B.C. and significant infrastructure was built to ferry “night soil” from cities to farms. The nutrient-rich fertilizer helped China build one of the most efficient farming operations in the ancient world. Elsewhere gathering night soil continues to be a full-time occupation for hundreds of thousands in India. Perhaps then it’s not an overstatement to say that human manure helped colonize the world and then feed it. As I watched the robot comb the interior of the city's digestive tract, searching for cracks and fissures (notably such fractures to the pipes are indicated by the presence of insect life inside the drain system) the impulse to make waste treatment invisible seemed greater and more complicated than ever as do the conditions through which waste materials are ascribed value.
I wanted to start by asking what interests you about the politics and logistics of obscuring or making waste invisible? What scholarly, activist, personal, political, or other concerns motivated the turn toward waste materials for you? What kinds of creativity are involved in working with waste in the contexts you are interested in and how has your practice/research been influenced by processes that metabolise, cannibalise or transform waste materials?
Alex Blanchette: I want to think with and against the title of this roundtable. The intuitive way of reading the phrase “working with waste” suggests active human creation. Waste is typically seen as discarded, inert, or passive materials waiting to be noticed, made visible, and re-animated by human ingenuity. Giving them new life, as the saying goes. However, American mass animal killing — the topic of my research — prompts me to approach “working with waste” in a different way. In industrial slaughterhouses, finding endlessly new uses for discarded blood, hooves, viscera, and skin has a very long history. It is about growing capitalist value, in the specific sense of finding new ways to employ — and exploit — human beings’ labor by inventing new products from animal biology. Waste, and its endless array of possible uses, is partly a means of maintaining human labor as the locus of value in our society. It is about keeping people working — perhaps as an end in itself. Waste is less about creativity than maintaining the world as it is.
The materials that I study are arguably not waste, at least not in the sense of discards. Seemingly excess blood, lungs, livers, or bones have been put to some kind of use by industrial meatpackers since at least the early 20th century. Slaughterhouses have used “all” of the pig for over a century. This has typically been in the form of rendering. These materials are cooked and processed into generic meals of protein, fat, and bone for use as cheap fertilizers and the like. But rendering is not very profitable. Meatpackers’ ideal is to have every unique bit of animal biochemistry accrue some kind of special function or product. Having a market — and a unique labor process — for every single inch of the pig allows them to increase the total worth of the species. An example is when a Japanese ramen company offshored their operations to the United States in search of a near-limitless supply of the front leg bones that they deemed best for soup base. This unique claim on one piece of the hog skeleton changed the very nature of the bones, leading to separate markets and preparations for distinct portions of the skeleton. At that point the company gained a new product code that they could sell, in addition to the 1,100 product codes they had already mapped onto pig bodies. This process appears to be interminable, as new ventures continuously emerge to extract yet more value from pigs’ bodies. I would not call this “sustainable” or “responsible” use. It seems more a matter of endlessly sifting through animals’ bodily substances for the solitary purpose of capitalist growth – an end that may not make sense beyond capital.
So what is “waste” in American meatpacking? I am less concerned about some discarded animal parts, if they even existed. Instead, I am more critical of the “wasted” human labor, time, ingenuity, and scientific knowledge that is diverted to mine yet another product from animal entrails.
Gabriel Coleman: Similar to Lucy I had the opportunity the other day to head out to a drainage ditch on a farm in north Kildare. I was helping the botanists I’m collaborating with for my thesis dig up some plants to assess how their fungal relationships affect how well they take up nitrogen and phosphorous. We’ve gotten a lot of steady rain across Ireland the past few weeks so soil is fairly saturated and the ditch was flowing quickly, threatening to overtop our waders. Down the field our ditch converged with a perpendicular drainage flow and, aggregated with other excess runoff in the watershed, carried excess fertilizers into the Rye River and then the sea
But in our ditch the water ran clear and watercress and docks flourished in its flow. It’s this invisibility and perceived benevolence of agricultural pollution that interests me. Because nitrates and phosphates are simple organic molecules that every organism needs to grow, it’s difficult for people to see them as serious pollutants despite their devastating effects on freshwater and marine ecosystems and human health. Of additional interest to me is how nitrate’s organic nature allows the fact that much of this dangerous nitrate pollution is the product of fossil energy to slip by unnoticed, at least it did until the current energy crisis caused fertilizer prices to skyrocket. Food and agriculture are deeply embedded in our bodies and daily rituals so I find conversations about fertilizer to be an interesting and visceral tool for people to think about their relationship with fossil industry and the climate crisis. It is my hope that concretely visualising the way our bodies and food systems weave into these planetary cycles will allow us to reach for more collaborative rather than exploitative networks of interspecies relationships.
Riar rizaldi: My interest in waste material is specifically related to technological/infrastructural waste. Since I was a child, I have always been interested in the practice of cannibalization of waste machines/electronic parts in order to reconstruct new objects or repair unusable things. In Indonesia, this practice is mostly carried out because the distribution of manufactured things, especially electronic goods, is uneven and the availability of specific parts is scarce. Most of the time, the practice of cannibalization is carried out by waste scavengers (people who always walk/stroll around the landfill) to repair or assemble new items. These scavengers tinker with e-waste and often use rudimentary methods that are dangerous, i.e. because the techniques used when cannibalizing cathode ray tubes are arbitrary, small explosions in the electronic landfill are very common. The culture of cannibalization demonstrates the other side of waste politics that I think less discussed, especially in a country where the production and circulation of materials are really complex. Often, waste that is considered economically unworthy—worsened by the reductionist mindset of homo economicus—is thrown anywhere, as nature is deemed as a big wastebasket. Waste scavengers and the practice of cannibalization emerge as a mode of survival in thinking of waste as a commons and source of livelihood.
In terms of my practice, in the beginning, my specific interest in waste and cannibalization was also driven by my fascination with JG Ballard (especially The Drowned World and The Drought) and early 90s cyberpunk dystopian literature. I often imagine that the logistic of waste in Indonesia, whether organic or hazardous waste, is moving in a very dystopic direction in an ecological context akin to the world-building of this sci-fi literature. On the other hand, relearning the animist and cosmological roots of indigenous people (especially the cosmology of Orang Lom in Bangka island) has also given me a lot of inspiration in seeing waste material in the context of material attachment—that everything is singular and monistic. Waste is just another form of matter with its own intrinsic value (the idea is almost similar to the first law of thermodynamics but for matter), the concept of production and consumption is circular. Methodologically, I use these strategies in terms of producing/reproducing moving images work. I see myself as a waste scavenger of moving images, looking for economically unworthy materials and arbitrarly rewriting and rethinking it as a form of filmmaking process.
Andra Phillith Haus: I’m not so much interested in waste materials, but more in considering ways in which pre-existing, corrosive economics could be piggy-backed onto. More specifically, the categorization of waste by market economies is a keystone of the culture of capitalism-- a type of lens through which one looks at a landscape and taxonomizes it into resource and waste (which is also written about wonderfully in Anna Tsing's Mushroom At The End of The World). There became little opportunities for infiltration in some the "waste" generated in certain market arenas-- particularly pharmaceuticals--that seemed useful to take a second glance at if only to see how this waste could be used as a connector of sorts, as a kind of shared product of our activities we are all re-exposed to due to improper management of waste, of the "cracks" in the pipes meant to hide and escort it to some other, unknown place. Urine, feces, etc. contain oodles of opportunities for re-exposures to a kind of highly complex drug cocktail we consume globally. So urine naturally became a material and a sample of where bodies are medically, how they are being mediated by "synthetic" intervention. Even beyond this more literal understanding of waste, however, using the lens I mentioned above also becomes interesting when considering other vital fluids-- I have specifically worked with blood in the past-- which are deemed waste or "wasted" in certain contexts (war, violence, period blood if one has a patriarchal bend) but vital and virtuous in others (blood donation, biological familial ties). Asking why these varying contexts cause this lens to reorient so much in what it calls waste somehow feels like a nice litmus test of societal moors, culture, etc. In the end, I suppose, what seems to bring me back to waste so much is that I have an inkling, maybe, that it is actually a brilliant way to "hack" into capitalist systems with a new, radical sense of connection between distant bodies which we are currently being robbed of. This might also shed some light on why waste MUST be so heavily managed and occluded-- it is a soft, vulnerable belly of the capitalist regime.
Elsa Richardson: Lucy’s description of Berlin’s sewer system as the ‘city’s digestive tract’ reminded me of a quite remarkable passage from Michael Gershon’s The Second Brain (1998) —the best-seller that introduced the enteric nervous system to the world— in which he describes the digestive tract as a ‘tunnel that permits the exterior to run right through us’. This image of the gut as kind of opening, a crack in the deep interior of the body where the world seeps in, captures something of my interest in waste. Have been working for a while on the cultural history of the stomach-mind connection, driven by a fascination with the gut as profoundly social, a noisy organ that speaks back in different ways across time and space. In relation to waste, I would say that underpinning my research is investment in the possibility that what we think of as the modern self might be far more intestinal than has been previously acknowledged. Against the conflation of mind with identity, which was partly the result of ascent of the neurosciences from the nineteenth century onwards, it is possible to read digestive processes —consumption, absorption, defecation— as other ways of making the self. Arguing for the centrality of the gut to how we make meaning about ourselves and the world, also involves thinking differently about the history of our relationship to waste. In his famous history of smell, The Foul and the Fragrant, Alain Corbin argues that over the eighteenth and nineteenth century a fundamental shift in attitudes regarding waste, privacy and hygiene occurred that impacted all aspects of life in France. Increasingly, according to Corbin, it was smell —from the pleasure of a fine scent to the visceral disgust induced by a foul one— that defined the social world. Here and elsewhere, the European city as an ordered, benlightened space is figured as a fantasy sustained by the disavowal of excremental processes through public health, municipal sanitation schemes and so on. Imagined along similar lines, the modern body has typically been framed in relation to the proper management of its waste products —urine, wind, saliva, and excrement— as means of marking children from adults, the upper classes from the lower, and civilised from savage. Thinking here of Norbert Elias and The Civilising Process. This version of events has never sat particularly well with me. The moment I am most interested in, early twentieth-century Britain, the period that is often cited as the birthplace of the truly modern subject, was also a period in which people became absolutely obsessed with their bowels: with the need for regularity, the threat of gastric disorder and the pharmaceutical, behavioral, dietary, and surgical interventions that might be made into the digestive process. Far from disavowing excretion, health consumers were encouraged to monitor, measure, and enhance it, to pay it a kind of attention that placed processes of elimination at the core of identity making.
Tamar Novick: The role that bodily waste gradually plays in our world, as Elsa describes is – how it came to mark the difference between children and adults, the poor and the rich, the savage and the civilized – is reminiscent of the term “boundary work” that comes for STS scholarship. This is one way in which work and waste come together. In my work on the long history of urine in use in science I see the interplay between waste and work in several other ways. In the field of sex-endocrinology, for example, which flourished in the 1920s, scientists came to understand urine as a substance full of scientific and financial potential – a reservoir of hormones that could be extracted and made into fertility drugs. Their relationship with waste has been substantial: some of these endocrinologists, gynecologists, and biochemists made either money or/and careers from working with urine. Their success depended on finding value in waste. Yet they have also struggled with the nature of their precarious research material, which came from unknown bodies, of either people or animals. In their work with waste, they have tended to conceal its nature by naming it something that does not scream “waste” to the common reading-eye, patient, or drug consumer. The issue of making waste invisible is one that I am very occupied with. Distancing waste from our sight and sensorial sensibilities is an important part of constructing the modern self. But this problem of invisibility is one that I myself am occupied with as a historian, trying to establish a work relationship with waste. Bodily waste materials are ones not easily detectable in the archives, and urine in particular, with its transparent and sterile properties, is one waste material particularly hard to work with.
Ari Nielsson: One thing that has surprised me a little in my working with waste has been the extent to which waste materials themselves have given way to their more incorporeal possibilities as media. Having arrived at the topic through research and writing on the changing valences of urine in idiomatic language, and from there, in social convention, infrastructure and artefacts, perhaps I shouldn’t be; piss has been used as a barometer of one sort or a conductive element of another for millennia. Nevertheless, in making work on waste and its displacement or invisibilisation, whether engendered by social attitudes, stigma or more pragmatic concerns of sanitation, I’m conscious that the enormity of the subject leads almost inevitably to one degree of abstraction or another. Even the most ardent materialist can only write ‘piss’ so many times before reaching for a synonym, or a euphemism. I’ve spent a great part of my professional life making figurative sculptures in miniature and so my perspective is, I suppose, at its core informed by questions of scale. Picking up on Alex’s point that waste isn’t always a discarded thing but an intentional by- or secondary product, I think there’s something compelling in framing waste as a form of abundance, allowing for the terrible quality of the sublime in surveying that vastness with the limited means at our disposal.
When I began to develop video work with my writing on urine as a starting point, I wondered whether focusing on public toilets in Europe, their provision and development first as gestures of munificence in the major cities of the imperial core, and later, the almost total sublimation of these infrastructures into the global portfolio of private capital was somehow too literal, too dispassionate to have any real bearing on the bodies that have a need for them. But in the lagging and inconsistent patchwork of vernacular toilet architectures between the nineteenth century and the present day I’d argue that we’ve been left with a kind of document of what changing strategies of invisibility look like, the wrought-iron of yesteryear giving way to anonymous stone-clad and steel rectangles that may well look equally archaic a century from now, but for their familiarity in the fabric of the city. The reference Elsa makes to Gershon seems to me to be in spitting-distance to Buckminster Fuller’s description of the average home as a “decorated nozzle at the end of a sewer” in treating waste processes as quasi-unknowable – or at the very least veiled in a polite fiction – occurring between interfaces of one kind or another, ‘natural’ or constructed. To me, the generative tension inherent in waste as a subject occurs between the constitution of these interfaces and digestions, and what can emerge from their discontinuities.
Jenna Sutela: Elsa’s thoughts around the gut-brain axis and the connections that Andra’s making between bodily waste and pharmaceuticals resonate with my interests in the topic of waste. I recently did a residency at MIT where I discovered biobanks that focus on collecting and preserving the biodiversity of human gut microbes for future generations—a bit like seed banks for plants. The biobanks are used to explore human evolution through diets and they also provide material for bacterial therapies like fecal transplants. I’m fascinated by the proposed mental effects of such therapies: the idea that we can accommodate the bacteria of others and feel better, mentally. It certainly feels like some kind of a circle is closing when the most prominent methods for treating depression seem to be excrement and ketamine at the moment! Anyway, considering ourselves as entities made of many species that live in, on and around us, all inseparably linked in their ecology and evolution, is central to my work. Basically the idea of a holobiont, after Lynn Margulis. When we see ourselves as causal contexts for something else, categories such as individual/community, organism/environment, inside/outside, are starting to get all fuzzy.
Xiyao Chen: The practice of cannibalisation of waste — machines/electronic parts in order to reconstruct new objects or repair unusable things — as Riar described it, reminded me of the concept of ‘bricolage’, first invoked by French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to refer to the process that leads to the creation of mythical thought, which ‘expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited’. Perhaps the process in which communities constantly make new use of the immediately available disused objects, rejected materials and discarded stories, through appropriation, alchemy and composting, is not dissimilar to the collective process of myth. I think I’m drawn to working with waste, as a process, precisely because of this indeterminate yet serendipitous process of bricolage - as a messy and entangled way of working in the thick planetary entanglement we live in. I spent last month during a residency in Lisbon, exploring the entanglement of interspecies relations, situated at the intersection between belief system and weather system. The local newspaper issued a warning to advise residents not to get in the sea, not because of adverse weather conditions, but the adverse level of pollution. There were days when I strolled along the sea, the water seemed calm but thick, almost silver and sluggish. Catostylus Tagi, which is the most commonly occurring jellyfish across the coasts of mainland Portugal that spends half of its life in the planktonic stage and speeds up its life cycle two or three times when the climate gets warmer, gathered around neon floating plastics, ingesting and cannibalising waste,blowing bubbles on the water surface. The word, anthropocene, generalises human’s impact, as a problematic singular and universal term that fails to distinguish the community efforts that contribute to climate justice, and those who work against it, on a planetary scale. While Donna Haraway highlighted the importance of ‘collaborative survival’, which is not limited to the human collaborative actions on a community scale, but more importantly the inter-species relations and kinships that could transform human-centred status quo. In the thick, sluggish, toxic mix of the pluri-presence, perhaps we are not as different as we thought we are from the plastic chewing Catostylus Tagi?
Wilma Stone: My most recent research interests are focused on state-sanctioned “stealth” practices of “slow” and epistemic violence that render some humans as waste, particularly those marginalised groups with histories of revolt against enclosure and extractivism, and therefore, to reuse Andra’s phrase, “must be so heavily managed and occluded”. Although recent scholarly work has begun urgently addressing the cultural ramifications of colonial legacies which actively erase Indigenous and local knowledge systems, their cultural heritage, and collective identity, the Scottish Gypsy Travellers have not received such valuable academic attention. As “a historical knowledge of struggles” and form of insurgent knowledge that developed in the face of ongoing land and epistemic enclosure and extractivism, this knowledge system has links to the current communal resistance movements working to resist enclosure across the globe. A focus on commoning as a (re)production activity as described by Riar and Xiyao, is, therefore, a vital survival and methodological practice as it encompasses alternative ways of knowing the world and the reciprocal feedback loop that culture-making embodies.
Rendered obsolete by neoliberalism, the travelling folks are currently situated within the most disadvantaged ethnic group in contemporary society. Many use modes of hiding and concealing their identity to avoid such debilitating, negative inscription. Utilising negation as a creative source of power has been formulated by contemporary Indigenous and decolonial scholars as a practice of refusal. Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt’s Practicing Refusal Collective articulates this as: “Refusal: a rejection of the status quo as liveable and the creation of possibility in the face of negation, i.e., a refusal to recognise a system that renders you fundamentally illegible and unintelligible; the decision to reject the terms of diminished subjecthood with which one is presented, using negation as a generative and creative source of disorderly power to embrace the possibility of living otherwise.” (My emphasis added). With this in mind, and thinking along with Ari, who suggests framing waste as a form of abundance, directs me towards the exciting possibility of practising refus(e)al with the hope of generating such an unruly force, and then using it as a creative tool.