Chapter 17
Waste/Value1
Introduction
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin offers, in his words, a “[m]odest methodological proposal for the cultural-historical dialectic.” “It is very easy,” he writes,
to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various “fields” of any epoch, such that on one side lies the “productive,” “forward-looking,” “lively,” “positive” part of the epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, and obsolescent. The very contours of the positive element will appear distinctly only insofar as this element is set off against the negative. On the other hand, every negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive. It is therefore of decisive importance that a new partition be applied to this initially excluded, negative component so that … a positive element emerges anew in it too – something different from that previously signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical apocatastasis. (2002: 459)2
Following this methodology of the cultural-historical dialectic, I propose a simple thesis: “waste” is the recurring other of “value” and, more pointedly, it is the antithesis of capitalist “value,” repeated with difference as part of capital’s spatial histories of surplus accumulation. I also suggest that by tracing the dialectic of value and waste, or the “positive” that acquires its valence against the background of the “abortive” or “retrograde,” we gain insight into how capital always draws its economic vitality and moral sanction from programs to domesticate and eradicate waste. Waste poses jeopardy to capital precisely because it confounds capital’s attempts to discipline and contain life within the domain of utility and accumulation; by contrast, waste rudely flags the omnipresent possibility of an orthogonal logic of dissipation that evades or exceeds capital’s dialectic.
Commons as Waste
Waste enters recorded history with the Magna Carta. These Charters of Liberties, drawn up in England in 1215, 1217, and 1225, are revered as the founding documents of political and legal rights that uphold Christian-Western civilization. Most famous among these rights is the writ of Habeas Corpus, which safeguards individual freedom against arbitrary state action. The Great Charter of the Forest from 1225 is the least known of the Magna Carta charters, but it is here that we find the most sustained defense of common rights in common lands, or wastes (Linebaugh 2009). Pushback occurs almost immediately. By 1235 the Statute of Merton proscribes common rights by authorizing the enclosure of manorial waste. Customary rights of common use to uncultivated manorial lands are curtailed but not annulled. As E.P. Thompson observes, commons and customary rights to them are heterogeneous and dynamic throughout England’s history:
The land upon which custom lay might be a manor, a parish, a stretch of river, oyster beds in an estuary, a park, mountain grazing, or a larger administrative unity like a forest. At one extreme custom was sharply defined, enforceable as at law, and (as at enclosure) was a property: this is the business of the court roll, the manorial courts, the recitations of customs, the survey and of village by-laws. In the middle custom was less exact: it depended on the continual renewal of oral traditions, as in the annual or regular perambulation of the bounds of the parish …
(Thompson 1993: 98).
It is not until the sixteenth century that enclosure assumes its infamous form as a mechanism of dispossession and disruptive agrarian change (Goldstein forthcoming). Much of England was still open in 1700, but most of it was enclosed by 1840. From the mid-sixteenth century through to the eighteenth, the process of enclosure radically transformed the English countryside. It helped catalyze the demise of feudal manors, small farms, and the common-field system of agriculture, and ushered the transformation to a capitalist system of production. Karl Marx chronicled the death of an epoch with savage brevity in Capital, volume 1:
The spoliation of the Church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property and its transformation into modern private property under circumstances of ruthless terrorism, all these things were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation. They conquered the field for capitalist agriculture, incorporated the soil into capital, and created for the urban industries the necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians.
(Marx 1992: 895)
Acts of Parliament sanctioned the enclosure of 6.8 million acres, or 20.9% of England, between 1750 and 1820 (Neeson 1993: 329). This massive redistribution of property was accompanied by upheavals in the customary rights and economic security of “commoners” who depended for support on an array of resources provided by that variegated category of lands called “commons” or “wastes.” Underscoring their critical function in local economies, the historian J.M. Neeson remarks:
The fuel, food and materials taken from common waste helped to make commoners of those without land, common-right cottages, or pasture rights. Waste gave them a variety of useful products, and the raw materials to make more. It also gave them the means of exchange with other commoners and so made them part of the network of exchange from which mutuality grew. More than this, common waste supported the economies of landed and cottage commoners too. It was often the terrain of women and children. And for everyone the common meant more than income.
(1993: 158–9)
Proponents of enclosure mounted economic and moral arguments for privatization, and these were frequently intertwined. John Clarke, a land and tithe agent from Herefordshire, offered a typical assessment in his 1794 account: “The farmers in this county are often at a loss for labourers: the inclosure of the wastes would increase the number of hands for labour, by removing the means of subsisting in idleness” (p. 28). Others, such as Arthur Young (1813), were more cutting: he found commoners, like the commons that provisioned them, wild and unproductive, to be subdued in the interests of progress. Thus, while the enclosure and privatization of common waste was instrumental in creating what Marx acidly describes as “necessary supplies of free and rightless proletarians” what is less appreciated is the formative role of waste as value’s dialectical negative. As the economic and moral antithesis of value, waste provided (and continues to provide) vitality and sanction to diverse projects of improvement. For projects of value, waste is “an enemy to be engaged and beaten” (Neeson 1993: 30–1). This antithetical aspect of waste, as a logic that stymies the accumulation of property, is mirrored in the various ways it comes to connote not merely the uncultivated or untended (for example in The Middle English Dictionary3 or latterly, the Oxford English Dictionary) but also the pointless, the misdirected, the futile; the ineffectual, the foolish, and the worthless; the idle and the improvident; the excessive, prodigal, and the improper. Here, most vividly, the economic and moral collide as impropriety confronts propriety and its etymological sibling, property. Proper character or disposition, the original meaning of proprieté (twelfth-century Old French), morphs after the seventeenth century to imply both property as “material possession” and propriety as “possession of or conformity to good manners.” Time, money, words, things, and nature: all may now be wasted, defiling property and propriety, and are censured accordingly.
“Waste” as Marker of Distance/Difference
In short, waste emerges as excess matter and material excess that is unruly and improper and threatens to thwart the multiplication of surplus as property. Or, to extend Mary Douglas’s now famous characterization of dirt/pollution, waste is objectionable precisely because it poses a “threat to good order” (Douglas 2002 (1966): 197). As disordered matter, or matter out of place, waste is a historical, political, and technical artifact, “which slips easily between concept, matter, experience and metaphor” (Campkin and Cox 2007: 1). Its figurative and physical vitality produces spaces of abjection and comes to invest them with disgust, repulsion, fascination, and disavowal. In the work of the feminist theorist Julia Kristeva (1982) bodily waste exposes the fragility of the border between self and other; more precisely, the open, fluid female body by disrupting borders becomes the abject other of the clean, decent, obedient, law-abiding male body – hence subject of/to regulation. Zygmunt Bauman presses this line of argument to its logical extreme to claim that “[h]omo sacer is the principal category of human waste laid out in the course of the modern production of orderly (law abiding, rule governed) sovereign realms” (Bauman 2004: 32). “Throughout the era of modernity,” he writes, “the nation-state has claimed the right to distinguish between order and chaos, law and lawlessness, citizen and homo sacer, belonging and exclusion, useful (= legitimate) product and waste” (ibid: 33). Homo sacer is, here, the life that is devoid of symbolic, economic, or political value, neither significant in the human realm nor the divine.
“Waste” also lurks as a founding impetus in John Locke’s political theory. Arguably the most influential English philosopher of the seventeenth century, Locke is, in many respects, a singular figure. He is the intellectual inspiration for social contract theories of society: a formative influence on Jean Jacques Rousseau as well as the architects of British liberalism (Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, among others). He is the proto-capitalist thinker par excellence: he makes property the bulwark of his political thought and its protection the principal task of the state as sovereign. Locke traces a direct line of causation between property, commerce, and the accumulation of wealth, which he gives the form of a divine injunction. Indeed, one might say that Locke clears the terrain for the emergence of a new object of knowledge and field of intervention, the “economy,” a task that is taken up and elaborated by classical political economy. Classical political economy also takes Locke’s views on property and commerce to their logical culmination by providing formal demonstrations for why the logic of market exchange should be the organizing principle of society. But all these developments can be traced back to one axiom from Locke: namely, “waste” as the constitutive outside of political modernity – that which must be continuously acted upon and improved, first to enable passage from the state of nature to that of civil society and subsequently to preserve that order of society.
It comes as no surprise, therefore, that justifications for colonial rule in India – its fixation on character and conduct, its imperative to generate revenue and to spur commerce and capitalist production, and its relentless manufacture of knowledge (erecting what John Stuart Mill was to call a “government of record,” as if the strangeness of India could be domesticated by sheer volume of empirical data) – regularly invoked the specter of “waste.” In fact, it takes little to surmise that the colonial obsession with waste was, in inverse, a theory of value, whose effects were to cast in sharp relief the physical infirmity and cultural inferiority of Indians, thereby clearing ground for a permanent colonial presence and, equally vital, for “development” as the answer to liberalism’s imperial contradictions (Gidwani 2008).
Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton (1996) have argued in a fascinating thesis that the modern idea of “development” as a theory of ordered progress and doctrine of trusteeship emerged in England in the social turmoil of the early nineteenth century, at the height of Parliamentary enclosures and mass migration of displaced peasants to cities for factory work. It was, they contend, the answer supplied by the social sciences to the unrest of the times: a doctrine for delivering improvement that promised to minimize the destruction that was historically associated with change. Oddly, they are entirely silent on the massive upheavals wreaked by enclosures in the early nineteenth century, precisely when the doctrine of development, they say, took root. Might ruling-class obsession with “improving” waste and the stigma of backwardness they attached to commoners who depended upon them for livelihoods have provided the soil in which the thought of development sprouted? Might the doctrine of development have found its earliest glimmers of life in India, where colonial anxiety to bring wastelands under the plough became the gravitational impulse for various projects of improvement?
Predictably, standard economic histories of British rule in India are mostly silent on the question of waste. When waste is considered it appears as merely a revenue category designating tracts of land that were not generating taxes for the exchequer, or were doing so poorly. But this narrow rendering of waste is surely unwarranted. As a concept, “waste” tersely condenses an entire early history of liberalism, joining the virtues of private property prosecuted in the seventeenth-century natural rights liberalism of John Locke and his followers to the doctrine of free market exchange, as a natural force that grows society’s wealth, enshrined in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political economy liberalism of Adam Smith and his interlocutors – an articulation of such force that its effects continue to set the parameters for policy debates today.4
On what basis can such a strong claim be sustained? The answer requires that we return to 1793, the year Lord Cornwallis, then Governor-General of India, enacted the Permanent Settlement into law in the East India Company’s territory of Bengal. The Permanent Settlement, as the name suggests, fixed the tax-rate on land for a period of 30 years. It further awarded proprietorship over land to zamindars, a superordinate layer of landlords and tax farmers, ignoring the rights of the land’s immediate cultivators. By fixing title and tax-rate advocates of the settlement sought to transform feudal satraps into a homegrown breed of agrarian capitalists, who would push wastelands into productive use and generate surplus for the ailing exchequer (Gidwani 1992).
Writing just a little over 100 years after the Permanent Settlement in Bengal, the British historian W.W. Hunter underscored the critical but nebulous influence of waste in that policy. He wrote “Even in regard to the all-important question of Waste Lands, whose vast extent and difficulties of reclamation determined both Cornwallis and the Court of Directors [of the East India Company] to declare the Settlement permanent, the area was absolutely unknown in any District” (Hunter 1894: 86). The oddness of this statement is obvious. On the one hand it is able to claim with apparent conviction that the extent of waste lands in Bengal was enormous, on the other it nonchalantly states that the actual area was unknown. Is this simply an instance of sloppy logic? If so, how is one to account for Cornwallis’s claim from 1789 that 1/3 of the Company’s territories lay “waste”?5 These impressionistic remarks were able to carry their degree of conviction precisely because they originated in a network of premises that had already rendered “India” as an object in imagination. The summoning of magnitudes was a rhetorical sleight of hand – shorthand as it were for what was already known: the immeasurable cultural difference separating the British from the Bengalis (equivalently, upper class advocates of enclosure in England were prone to describe commoners there as “idle,” “indolent,” “wild,” and “uncivilized,” in short a different breed of humans).
Waste as Society’s External Margin
The specter of “waste” was invoked with tedious regularity in the torrent of British land settlement documents that followed in the decades after the Permanent Settlement. In virtually every instance the invocation prompted policies that invested certain groups, considered industrious and entrepreneurial, with land titles even as the customary or common claims of others were denied. Consistent through these acts of dispossession was a portrayal of waste as an indetermination: an untapped potential awaiting transformation into value by dint of human labor and colonial stewardship.
The source of colonial ideology lay, as hinted earlier, in the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke. He, more than any other figure, was responsible for bringing the “problem” of waste into the modern political imagination. Locke not only made waste the ethical horizon of civil society but in so doing valorized a normative modern subject, “an agent who possesses the uncomplicated identity of a free, rational, equal individual who relies on his a priori status to depart from his natural condition” (Seth 2010: 79). In Locke’s imaginative geography “waste” (and those pre-rational subjects who condoned its existence) became the constitutive outside of civil society. His influential writings defended the virtues of individual labor, the sanctity of property acquired by mixing labor with objects, and the natural rights of individuals, and conceived for the state the limited but critical role of regulating and securing men’s property (see particularly, Locke 1988 (1681): 285–302). These injunctions, which established the inseparability of reason, freedom, and property, were to become the touchstones of British liberalism.
But Locke’s arguments, although offered up as a doctrine of freedom, are underwritten by violence and exclusion. Nowhere is this illiberal “trace” more visible than in Locke’s 1681 Second Treatise of Government, a sustained defense of English settler colonialism in North America that was enormously influential in the making of English, French, and American liberalism. Locke makes an ingenious move when he is confronted with the objection that English settlers in the New World are dispossessing Native Americans of lands that are rightfully theirs. He invokes “evidence,” what any reasonable person can affirm, to show this is not the case. The “matters of fact” that Locke summons include the observation that Indians roam freely over the land, without enclosing it. When they do enclose it (as coastal Indians did) their practice of letting it lie fallow every three years “demonstrated that they did not make rational use of it.” More so, even when they did cultivate land, it was evidently never to its “best possible use.” The Indians’ lack of desire “to accumulate wealth” clinched the matter for Locke, inspiring the conclusion that they “were not entitled to have their territorial integrity respected by others” (Parekh 1995: 86).
Indeed, what Locke develops in the slender Second Treatise is nothing less than the essence of good government and the rational subject, who, unencumbered by pre-rational social relations, is ready for political citizenship. “Civil society” is conjured as the contractually negotiated after of “the state of nature.” Who enters into these negotiations? Those who have managed to become property holders by enclosing waste through application of labor. Thus a series of exclusions (gendered and otherwise) is already in place before passage into civil society. In Locke’s formulation, to be recognized as a political being with claims is to labor, to exert industry, and to improve – add value to – nature lying “idle” or “waste.”
Locke’s labor theory is a normative theory of property and value. It is not, strictly speaking, a labor theory of value where labor functions as the common measure of exchange value (or price). This undertaking, associated most closely with the British classical economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and subsequently critiqued and emended by Karl Marx), identified labor as “the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” and “the only measure by which we can compare the values of different commodities at all times and places,” (A. Smith 1937(1776): 31). Still, it is possible to glimpse in Locke’s ruminations on waste the intellectual antecedent of the labor theory of value that was to emerge several decades later. Locke is, in many respects, the proto-capitalist thinker par excellence, whose moral injunctions against waste continue to lurk in, both, the classical labor theory of value as well as its neoclassical successor, which sees itself waging a relentless battle against “inefficiencies,” or waste, of all sorts.
Waste as Society’s Internal Margin
The theme of nature as bountiful yet wasteful, unless properly harnessed by application of human labor, is a powerful undercurrent in Locke’s theory. It is one that has served the Euro-western geographical imagination, acting as a powerful catalyst for projects of landscape transformation in colonial Bengal (Hunter 1894), the conquered prairies of the American Midwest (Cronon 1992), and Zionist settler projects in Mandate Palestine (Gregory 2004). David Gilmartin (2003) shows how a compatible yet historically different anxiety around nature’s wastefulness emerged in mid-nineteenth-century India in the science of irrigation engineering. The construction of the Ganges canal in the 1840s, followed by the establishment of a Public Works department in the newly annexed territory of Punjab in the 1850s, spurred a demand for irrigation engineers. The opening of the College of Civil Engineering in Roorkee in 1848 was meant to cater to this demand. Many of Roorkee’s professors were drawn from the Royal Engineers. These military engineers were consumed with a sense of professional mission that was “intimately linked to colonialism” (Gilmartin 2003: 5058) and aspired to a worldwide science that would put mathematics at the service of the state. In Baconian fashion, their benchmark of victory was “success … in ‘subduing’ nature, and turning its products into ‘resources’ that could be used for purposes of production” (ibid).
This mission was vividly personified in the technical jargon that arose. Hence the notion of putting water to work – condensed in the term water’s “duty” – has become standard in modern irrigation manuals. It is a measure of “the relation between the volume of water and the area of crop it matures” (ibid). The word “duty” captures the two senses of value – economic and moral – that are entangled in modern crusades against waste. Hence, “duty” was both a “fundamental measure of irrigational value” (ibid: 5059) that reflected its relative scarcity and ability to turn an economic surplus, as well as the engineer’s moral calling – the measure of his success – in controlling “nature’s waste.” Thus, “[m]easurements of duty inevitably hinged on calculations of “waste” (water losses) in all the parts of canal systems, including the irrigators’ fields” (ibid).
It was precisely the last of these components – the irrigator’s fields – that was the limit point of this system of water delivery and valuation. “Village communities” of irrigation users, over which irrigation science had little or no leverage, became the “black box” where the engineers’ battle against nature’s waste met a rude halt. In an eerie replay of history, villages in north India came to be associated with pre-modern and non-rational forms of sociality organized around “wastelands.” In a meticulous study of wastelands in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Punjab Chakravarty-Kaul (1996) notes how colonial administrators treated these “simply as surplus land available for cultivation,” blithely overlooking their numerous uses and the “highly complex and varied … institutions of communal control over waste” (21–3). This “state simplification” of wastelands, as James C. Scott (1999) might characterize it, enabled an image of village India as somehow outside the purview of modern forms of reason and hence economically stagnant.
It was an image that was to carry over into the postcolonial era, where the country’s planners routinely characterized the task of modernizing India as a struggle against the forces of tradition and unreason (Chatterjee 1986; Guha 2011). “Development” as a form of bio-political stewardship that would spur economic growth and improve the population’s well-being came to loom large in the national imagination. In one memorable instance, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, made the case for “development” by launching a savage crusade against waste. Speaking in New Delhi in 1954 to a meeting of the Coordination Board of Ministers for River Valley Projects, he admonished his audience:
We have to utilize the experience we have gained, pool our resources and prevent wastage. … We cannot allow the nation’s resources to be wasted. Democracy has many virtues, but one of its concomitants is wastage of time and energy. Nevertheless, for many reasons, we prefer democracy to other methods of government. That does not mean that we cannot avoid waste. We cannot afford waste, because the basic thing is that we should go ahead. The devil is at our heels, or as they say, “Shaitan peechhe ata hai, to bhagte hain.” I should like you to have this kind of feeling. To hell with the man who cannot walk fast. It serves him right if he gets out of the ranks and falls out. We want no sluggards. … I want work and work and work. I want achievement. I want men who work as crusaders.
(Nehru 2003, Vol. 2: 148; my italics)
Although the tides of state-led development have ebbed, the battle against waste has not. Cities in the global South are the new theaters of war and urban reform with the promise of “world class” living the new battle cry. Eradication of waste – matter, people, places, and practices that sully this global aesthetic – is once more center stage. The drive to cleanse contemporary cities of waste resembles, in uncanny ways, an older crusade against waste that was conducted by sanitary reformers and advocates of public hygiene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the cities of Europe and North America (Melosi 2000; Joyce 2003). But the similarities between an older era of urban reform and the new one currently upon us must not be exaggerated. There are vital differences. The first and most obvious is the influence of global capital flows that are the driving forces behind various forms of urban re-invention, renewal, and gentrification today (N. Smith 2002). Second, with rising urbanization and levels of consumerism waste has become capitalist society’s internal margin in the form of unending streams of excreta that issue from its voracious consumption of nature.
More pointedly, a model of economic prosperity that portrays itself in a relentless war against waste has been joined, since the 1950s in the United States and more recently in other parts of the world, by a new paradigm that thrives on waste. As the historian Susan Strasser (1999: 15) observes: “Economic growth in the twentieth century has been fueled by waste – the trash created by packaging and disposables and the constant technological and stylistic change that has made ‘perfectly good’ objects obsolete and created markets for replacement.” Strasser’s point here is not the newness of “disposability.” Wasteful conducts and conspicuous consumption have long been staple tactics in the quiver of practices employed by the rich to signal and guard social status (cf. Veblen 2008(1899)). In the words of urban planner Kevin Lynch (1990: 31), “where material shortage is the norm, discarding things is a notorious way of demonstrating power.” What changed in the West post-1945 was the emergence of a “mass consumption society” armed with the wherewithal and will to embrace the regulative ideal of convenience that underlies disposability.6 The wealthy continued to waste, but they were subsequently joined by an expanding middle-class that could also afford to waste (albeit in less sumptuous ways).
The escalating spiral of consumption has now stretched across the globe; and while spatial and class disparities in consumption remain sharp, increasingly it is the rising middle classes of growth centers such as Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the so-called BRIC nations) that are its vanguard. According to the Worldwatch Institute (2010), “[w]orldwide, private consumption expenditures – the amount spent on goods and services at the household level – topped $20 trillion in 2000, a four-fold increase over 1960 (in 1995 dollars).” The amount of post-consumer waste has risen correspondingly, with China’s municipalities alone estimated to be generating 190 million tons of trash per year – a figure that could soar to 480 million tons by 2030, nearly double the amount the United States is projected to produce over the same period (Jones 2007).
Karl Marx famously depicted capitalist social relations by the shorthand notation M-C-M’, where value as money capital is utilized to purchase a commodity, labor-power, by offering its bearer, the worker, a wage; the worker in turn puts her creative capacity to labor to produce a good or service that can be sold in the market for a money value that exceeds the wage paid to the worker, thereby yielding surplus value for the capitalist who employed her. We can stretch Marx’s formula by hypothesizing a waste/value dialectic, W-(M-C-M’)-W’, that brackets the capitalist dialectic, M-C-M’. In this extended version matter-nature as untapped potential (“waste”) is pressed into commodity production that generates new forms of waste at the moment of appropriation (when waste in enrolled into capital’s circuit), in the moment of production (as leakage, chaff, and entropic exudation), and, finally, in the moment of consumption (as unusable and reusable matter). The final amount W’ may or may not differ from the initial amount W. But W’ is qualitatively different from W, with the implication that not all of W’ may be as usable as W was, given economic and technological constraints as well as existing social-political relations. Indeed, measured as entropy W’ is always greater than W.
In a past era of urban reform, when quantities of waste (W’) were less voluminous, public hygiene and waste disposal were the paramount considerations. Thus sanitation reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries instituted municipal trash collection systems oblivious, or worse apathetic, to the destruction of livelihoods and trades that the city’s poor immigrants had painstakingly built around the disposal of urban detritus, from swill to salvage. While such dispossession of populations involved in the waste trades continues in contemporary urban reform drives, today’s projects of reform are so deeply entangled in global circuits of capital that post-production and post-consumption waste (W’) are now eyed by cities as sources of recoverable value and unredeemed profit. Municipalities from Bogota to Manila are on a warpath to “modernize” waste management, prodded by middle class ire and activist (frequently anti-poor) court rulings. But in this round of urban renewal the desire of cities to become “world class” has meant auctioning off waste management functions to private corporations. This process has caused untold harm to the livelihoods of groups such as the zabbaleen of Cairo, the “reclaimers” of Johannesburg, and the kabaris of Delhi: urban commoners who have fabricated intricate and ingenious circuits of waste recycling as mainstays of income (Assaad 1996; Chaturvedi and Gidwani 2010). In short, the exclusionary urbanism and renewed enclosure of the commons that is transforming contemporary cities in the global South is repeating with difference a centuries old class war against waste.
The Matter of Waste
And so “waste,” which began as civil society’s literal and figurative frontier in the early years of capitalism, has become its internal and mobile limit in the contemporary capitalist era. The municipal or policy response has been to bracket waste as a technical problem. The corresponding impulse within the social sciences, as Crang and Gregson (2010: 1026) note, has been to identify waste predominantly “in terms of waste management; a move which ensures that waste is defined by, and discussed in terms of, ‘disposal’ technologies, or – more correctly – waste treatments, and their connection to policy.” The contrary tendency, among critical theorists, to approach waste in primarily discursive terms is no better in their minds. One makes the “stuff of waste” the purview of engineers and industrial managers, the other “idealizes” waste. Neither adequately attends to the material properties of waste and the different associations (social, political, physical, and corporeal) – stretched variably in space – that emerge around different forms of waste. Should we not ask, they wonder, how “different matters [come to] matter differently”? Thus, Gregson, Watkins, and Calestani (2010) think through the animating properties of asbestos, a hazardous material, in ship demolition: how its internal properties come to matter in the dismantling of aged vessels, to the bodies and lives of those who undertake this perilous work, and to labor geographies (ships are typically broken apart at shipyards in poor countries such as Bangladesh and India, by low-paid workers who toil with little or no safety equipment, at considerable risk of injury or death). Similarly, Lepawsky and McNabb (2010) highlight how an international division of labor plays a formative role in the transformation of what is waste in one place into value elsewhere. Arguing for the spatial circularity of e-waste circuits they show that:
e-waste materials and their effects move and persist in ways that belie models of e-waste flows that conceptualize a linear chain of production-consumption-disposal. A linear model of e-waste flows suggests a ‘final resting place’, an ultimate distancing of waste. … Yet, waste rarely, if ever, settles in one place. It flows elsewhere, it returns, not only as pollution and toxicity, but also as the feedstock of new rounds of commodity production (and, hence, forms of value).
(ibid: 189)
In a different register, Gille (2010) wrenches our attention away from municipal waste to industrial – chemical and metal – waste. Objecting to the “splitting” of consumer waste and producer waste, she exhorts us to define waste as “any material we have failed to use” – a move that leaves “open the opportunity to demonstrate the material and social consequences of one type of waste material metamorphosing into another as it traverses the circuits of production, distribution, consumption, reclamation, and ‘annihilation’.” (2010: 1050)
Conclusion
“Pauperism is the hospital of the active labour-army and the dead weight of the industrial reserve army,” Karl Marx writes in Chapter 25 of Capital, volume 1 (1992). “Its production is included in that of the relative surplus population, its necessity is implied by their necessity; along with the surplus population, pauperism forms a condition of capitalist production, and of the capitalist development of wealth” (p. 797).
This could well stand as a précis of the modern annals of “waste,” a bitter and sometimes bloody struggle between two “eco-classes” (Reid and Taylor 2010): on the one side, the propertied who lead lives that churn out immense quantities of “waste”; on the other, commoners whose lives are built on removal of this commodity detritus. On the one hand, lives whose labor is valued and rewarded; on the other, lives that are of indifference to global capital. One set of lives that are seen as worth cultivating and another set of lives that are cheapened, used, and easily discarded. Linking the discourse of waste to matters of political economy, Melissa Wright’s (2006) ethnographies of femicide and devalued women’s work in the maquiladora cluster of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, bear stark witness to the gendered violence of capital accumulation. Valuable lives, wasted lives, and mapped onto these, valuable spaces and spaces designated as wasteful. Colonizing and remaking wasted spaces as valuable spaces, excluding from political citizenship those whose labors are not counted. This is the continuing juggernaut of enclosure that wants to replace the common, wherever it encounters it, by commodity.
I have suggested that by gathering a series of negative associations about commoners, their conducts, and the common wastes that supported their livelihoods in myriad ways, “waste” became indexical of the necessity for an ordering rule of property. John Locke’s political theory was the philosophical antecedent of this principle. In his influential Second Treatise of Government (1681) the figure of waste comes to designate the unenclosed common, the external frontier, and the ethical horizon of civil society. Correspondingly, the transformation of waste – idle land and nature’s bounty – into something useful became the defining moment of political modernity in Locke’s treatise. Having entered the discourse of western liberalism, “waste” found uncanny afterlives across the globe. Thus, colonial irrigation manuals devised around the management of large irrigation systems in British Punjab and elsewhere reveal a preoccupation with thwarting nature’s profligacy: epitomized by water’s natural tendency to run to waste. This effort to rationally control nature and minimize its wastefulness accentuated a different conception of waste than the one present in land settlement and revenue administration policies: waste as the horizon of property relations, a realm outside production that staged the difference between India’s village communities and colonial rule; one mired in age-old bonds of ascription, the other guided by the force of reason.
The same dividing line – with the modern and the rational on the one side, and traditional and the irrational on the other – reasserted itself in post-Independence India. The trope of waste became a centerpiece in Nehru’s moral-technological crusade to advance the nation through development planning. My argument has culminated in the present era, when “waste” in its heterogeneous forms has come to mark society’s internal margins – a renewing source of jeopardy to capitalism but also a fiercely contested frontier of surplus value production.
There is perhaps no more provocative figure of this struggle – a figure who personifies the cultural-historical dialectic of waste and value – than the Parisian rag picker, recovered as a positive force from the depths of negativity, first by Charles Baudelaire and subsequently Walter Benjamin, who saw in him a kinsman with a shared sensibility:
Here we have a man whose job it is to pick up the day’s rubbish in the capital. He collects and catalogs everything that the great city has cast off, everything it has lost, and discarded, and broken. He goes through the archives of debauchery, and the jumbled array of refuse. He makes a selection, an intelligent choice; like a miser hoarding treasure, he collects the garbage that will become objects of utility or pleasure when refurbished by Industrial magic
(Baudelaire, Oeuvres, vol. 1, pp. 249–50, quoted in Benjamin 2002: 350 (J68,4)).
And like this rag picker whose strange virtuosity transforms the discards of society into something far more, so too our archivists of capitalism who strive to recover a narrative of the sublime from its endless, inchoate detritus; who, in the spirit of a cultural-historical dialectic apply “a new partition” to the “initially excluded, negative component so that … a positive element emerges anew in it too – something different from that previously signified.” Thus, waste not merely as the “retrograde” of value, but as placeholder for a vital logic of dissipation that constantly threatens to evade and exceed capital’s grasp.
Notes
1 This would have been far lesser without the sharp, inimitable editorial hand of Trevor Barnes.
2 The translators clarify the word “apocatastasis” as “restoration of all things” (see fn 5, p. 989).
3 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED51853 (last accessed September 21, 2010). Also see Scanlan (2005: 22) on the etymology of “waste.”
4 In this articulation also lies the explanation for why contemporary neoliberals are able to assert a causal link between “human rights” and “democracy” and the spread of the “free market.” For a suggestive exploration of this, see Talal Asad (2003).
5 Governor General’s Minute, September 18, 1789, in Firminger (1917), Vol. 2: 512. Also see H. Colebrooke’s Minute (no date), para. 14, in Selection of Papers from the Records of the East India House, 4 Vols. (London: Printed by order of the Court of Directors, 1820), 1: 420 (microfiche).
6 It was precisely this “mass consumption society” that was reviled by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002(1947)) and celebrated by W.W. Rostow in his The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (1991(1960)).
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