Trash, Culture, and Transdisciplinarity
A trash can in Lima, Peru, painted by an anonymous artist. (Photo by author)
In an essay entitled “Nunca fue tan hermosa la basura,” Spanish philosopher José Luis Pardo makes a simple modification to the famous opening line of Karl Marx’s Capital—“The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’” (41)—in a way that underlines the ecological stakes of how capitalism organizes life. For Pardo, wealth under capitalism does not present itself in the form of commodities, but rather as “una inmensa acumulación de basuras” (163, emphasis in the original). And while waste is something that humans have produced under all sorts of social formations, capitalism seems to distinguish itself by producing trash in greater quantities and with greater speed than other systems, to the point that, as Pardo puts it, “la basura ha llegado a convertirse en una amenaza para la propia sociedad” (163).
Trash, waste, garbage, and discards of all kinds are not only symptomatic of the woes of growth-oriented consumer society, but are also a significant part of our material legacy as “one of the most lasting and visible monuments to human existence on Planet Earth” (Amago 6). The problem of trash—its overwhelming quantity, where it should go, its longevity—may be apparent, but it also seems to be subject to the kinds of rationalizations and disavowals that push it to the periphery of our concerns, which is a point many scholars of waste routinely make. Serial replacement of consumer goods cultivates an ethos of disposability that makes consumption (and disposal) easy and seamless (Hawkins 24-30), a situation that has become normalized and unquestioned in many corners of the globe (Liboiron and Lepawsky 13-14). As disposability has become easier and more widespread, we find ourselves less and less inclined to think about the waste produced by societal growth and progress (Prádanos 165), and, even when we do think about it, neoliberal waste management paradigms allow us to indulge in the fantasy of that waste being effectively neutralized by human technical prowess that allows us to master our environments (Ureta 1553-54). Whether we don’t want to think about trash because it disgusts us, makes us feel bad or depressed about the state of the environment, or it’s simply easier not to do so, if Pardo (and a host of others) is right, trash is something we must think about, seriously and deeply.
In consonance with the focus of the LACIS Review’s inaugural issue, I would offer that the only way to think through the problem of trash is from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. What is more, trash seems to me to be an especially apt subject for transdisciplinary thinking. We need to rely on the work of scientists (biologists, chemists, environmental scientists) who can illuminate the ecological impact of microplastics in waterways, leachate from landfills, and other physical effects of trash; anthropologists and sociologists who think through the forms of sociality, inclusion, and exclusion that arise in concert with wasting practices and contact with discards; historians and geographers who trace the temporal and spatial development of waste management practices; and science and technology studies scholars who follow the more-than-human networks that show how dealing with discards is a question of power relations (Liboiron and Lepawsky 62-63). And we need to rely on the knowledge and expertise of the people who live and work in close contact with trash, whether as “formal” or “informal” waste workers.
One discipline that is absent from the preceding list is literary and cultural studies, the discipline within which I myself operate. Does the study of literary and cultural production have something to contribute to the transdisciplinary networks of inquiry that help us make sense of the social and environmental stakes of the production of trash? I believe that it does, but only when the specific properties that make cultural texts meaningful are understood in the broader context of human and nonhuman forms of expression. The Latin American novels, short stories, poems, films, and more that I study are not more or less important or valuable than other ways of knowing or making meaning, but their specific properties offer us a crucial perspective on all manner of ecological concerns, including the issue of waste. In my own academic work, I have found waste to be a significant part of social reality across Latin America, and, as such, it occupies the attention of writers and filmmakers who are attuned to the discursive power that trash takes on as it flows through different spaces, colliding with and repelling bodies, inhabiting the ambiguous borderland between rigid conceptualizations of nature and culture. Texts that are attentive to the stories that trash has to tell manage to highlight the material ties that bind together issues that have long been important sites of critical reflection in Latin American culture: the uses and abuses of the environment, marginalization of the Other, and violence.
By telling stories that show how these issues are simultaneously discursive and material, cultural texts that address trash manage to make aesthetic interventions that pose urgent questions regarding the nature of culture in contemporary Latin America and the aesthetic and ethical implications of the increasingly notable presence of trash in the region’s cultural production. Whether we are talking about novels and documentary films that have dumps and landfills as major settings (like Andrés Neuman’s Bariloche or Marcos Prado’s Estamira), short stories and crónicas whose main characters are garbage pickers (like Julio Ramón Ribeyro’s “Los gallinazos sin plumas” or Alicia Dujove Ortiz’s ¿Quién mató a Diego Duarte?), novels that portray writing as a process of digging through the trash and piecing together a story from the material found therein (like Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s Zero), or environmental activism that uses waste to critique contemporary spatial practices and offer potential solutions (like the work of the architectural cooperative Basurama), it is clear that cultural actors across Latin American sense José Luis Pardo’s fear that the trash we produce can be our undoing. As a scholar of Latin American culture, I am likewise committed to engaging with the problem of trash by advocating for the role of literature, film, art, and other cultural practices in shedding light on the stakes of the problem of trash and, along with actors working from other disciplines and ways of knowing, imagining more ethical ways of dealing with waste.
About the Author
Micah McKay is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama. His research focuses primarily on the representation of trash in contemporary Latin American cultural production and attempts to consider the ecological, political, and aesthetic stakes of waste. His other research interests include biopolitics, critical animal studies, posthumanism, and urban studies.
Works Cited
Amago, Samuel. Basura: Cultures of Waste in Contemporary Spain. University of Virginia Press, 2021.
Hawkins, Gay. The Ethics of Waste: How We Relate to Rubbish. Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
Liboiron, Max, and Josh Lepawsky. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. MIT Press, 2022.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, Modern Library, 1936.
Pardo, José Luis. Nunca fue tan hermosa la basura. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2010.
Prádanos, Luis I. Postgrowth Imaginaries: New Ecologies and Counterhegemonic Culture in Post-2008 Spain. Liverpool University Press, 2018.
Ureta, Sebestián. “Caring for waste: Handling tailings in a Chilean copper mine.” Environment and Planning A, vol. 48, no. 8, 2016, pp. 1532-48.
