The Sense of Waste
Abstract
This thesis begins with the observation that waste is to an outsized degree subject to the modal verbs; we might say that waste gives way to the sense of waste. As a result, waste appears as an unusually animate–and animating–actant, producing in those who apprehend it the impulse to put that which is wasted to use. The introductory chapter establishes this fact and provides a brief overview of scholarly approaches to the study of waste, asserting that in order to transcend mere description of the phenomenon it is necessary to establish how waste as an actant entered into its present relation with human actors. The second chapter establishes the historicity of the relation between waste and those who apprehend it. This chapter finds that waste took on agitating character following the enclosure of the common wastes, and the vanishing of the original, integral referent that was inclusive of both socially egalitarian and economic dimensions. I argue that waste has since became a dead metaphor latently active in the conceptual system enabling one to identify waste in only its economic dimension. The agitation about waste is thus the impulse to repeat the gesture of enclosure. The final chapter, by way of an analysis of Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, argues for the necessity of constructing a Benjaminian dialectical image of waste in order that a utopian dimension of waste might come into focus.