On Garbage

by John Scanlan

This is the first work to examine the detritus of our culture in its full range; garbage in this sense is not only material waste and ruin, environmental degradation and so on, but also residual or 'broken' knowledge, useless concepts, the remainders of systems of intellectual and cultural thought. In this unique and original work (a kind of intellectual scavenging in its own right) the author shows why garbage is, perversely, the source of all that is valuable. The author considers how Western philosophy, science and technology attained mastery over nature through what can be seen as a prolonged act of cleansing, the disposal of incorrect, outmoded or superseded knowledge. By detailing the waste, ruin and nonsense that we have discarded, the author argues that we can learn new things about the accepted truths and basic building blocks of our culture; he throws new light on our modern condition by examining not what we have kept, but what we have thrown away. On Garbage shows that disposal causes not only the mountains of rubbish that we occasionally believe threatens to overwhelm us; it also creates a host of other 'garbage', particularly in the dead ends of useless knowledge and the often abject reality of our disposable lives. It turns out that we ourselves have become the garbage of our times. This bold and thought-provoking work will be of interest to readers in areas as diverse as cultural studies and social theory, the histories of philosophy, public health and the environment, as well as those interested in the aesthetics of contemporary art.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology, Cultural

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2005

Reviews

[Doa'a Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

لم أتوقع حين اقتنيت الكتاب بنية الاهتمام بموضوع بيئي؛ أنني سأقرأ هذا الزخم الفلسفي والفني والاجتماعي، كتاب عالق بذاكرتي وقد عدت اليه مرارا لقراءة افكاره التي تكشف عن نفسها اكثر مع طول العشرة... سعيدة بالبدء بكتاب ثاني يعالج موضوع الذاكرة لنفس هذا الفيلسوف ذو الفكر الثاقب...

[Apubakr · Rating 5 out of 5]

كتاب عظيم جداً . أنصح به

[Fran · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first couple of chapters are really smart and insightful. After that the book loses focus and it's not quite clear what he's actually arguing.

[Maryam Alhamar · Rating 4 out of 5]

كتاب جميل، عميق بمواضيع فلسفية عدة، قد يستلزم أكثر من قراءة واحدة
يدفع القارئ للتفكير والنظر بأمور لا يفكر بها عادة

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was not everything I had hoped for. But it was very good. He covers a really broad range of theoretical, philosophical, and cultural references. It reminds me of Jon MacKenzie's "Perform or Else" in both that range of sources and the lack of coherent synthesis. I like the artists he mentions as touch-stones (Rauschenberg, for instance), and I really liked his inclusion of advertising materials for goods + services (such as paper shredders or cautioning about identity theft) as objects of study but it didn't really come together for me in the end. I wished he had put together something more compelling, disturbing, dislocating for me as a contemporary, garbage producing american. On a positive note, this book feels like a book-length expansion of a PhD Dissertation, and I think that is kind of neat. I certainly will come back to it to chase down his references. I'm still searching for theories of abject materiality.

[Odeta Putkyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book really misses the main driving idea, namely Scanlan's position on garbage. If it is that garbage loses signification, then the book is too much bits and bobs of everything. However, I liked the example of a garbology pioneer doing in a way ethnographic research on people's garbage, for example, digging into the garbage of Bob Dylan.