Joel Kim

APES 4
3/20/15
What is Waste? A Vital Materialists Standpoint
Capitalist society is predicated off of the destruction of objects for power when people
destroy objects, People gain power from them. For example, the worker is destroyed and
consumed by lowering of wages and placing into horrible conditions. In the same way, the
original exploitation of nature like the killing of animals and discarding of their bones or the use
of chopped down trees illustrates this. The criticism of capitalism begins from the question of
production rather than consumption of things, which means critics cannot resolve the existence
of trash productive facilities will still exist. A Marxist analysis will never fully subsume the
nature of what is waste.
Each item has a story - the cloth shed from a wedding dress, drums shaken overboard by
a strong wind, a telephone whose screws rusted and gave way to the sea - but in the moment of
its destruction, a point of seemingly no-return to its value, it is rendered passive and cast. The
capacity to trash beings and to annihilate their existence structure modern society. In destruction,
the value created is much more intense, wherein this violence, the disposed are meant to
disappear. It is the failure to evacuate their remains that forces a jettison of waste in order to
falsify being. So what is waste? It is when something means nothing to you that it becomes
garbage. Although litter is virtually always within sight (hidden in containers, garbage cans etc.)
People are culturally trained to overlook it. People become culturally conditioned to adopt a
negligent and ignorant attitude towards objects that people deem trash. Disposal thus is not only
about throwing things away, it is also about how people manage and are managed by the absent.
As already been touched upon, debris does have a powerful impact on society in many ways
also mentally. Garbage that has not been correctly discarded haunts us and imposes a degree of
agency upon us.
The question of what waste is thus an analysis of the root of what people deem waste and
why it is polluting society today. What is needed to fully understand societys intricate
relationship to its waste is not only a cultural investigation but also an ontological reorientation
to what people deem waste. Waste, like everything in the world, is an object. That object has
agency that acts upon and influences other objects. People must attempt to accept the
inevitability of that agency to ameliorate the negative relationship people have to trash today.