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On Garbage
How do we decide what is junk? The discarded remnants of our daily lives may no longer be useful to us, yet John Scanlan proposes in On Garbage that our trash is actually a treasure trove of artifacts that reveals intriguing insights into the modern human condition and the evolution of Western culture.
On Garbage is the first book to examine the detritus of Western culture in full range—not only material waste and ruin, but also residual or "broken" knowledge and the lingering remainders of cultural thought systems. Scanlan considers how Western philosophy, science, and technology attained mastery over nature through what can be seen as a prolonged act of cleansing, as scientists and philosophers weeded out incorrect, outmoded, or superseded knowledge. He also analyzes how disposal not only produces overwhelming mountains of waste, but creates dead bits of useless knowledge that permeate the reality of modern Western societies. He argues that physical and intellectual debris reveal new insights into the basic tenets of Western culture and, ultimately, that the abject reality of our disposable lives has led to us becoming the "garbage" of our times.
On Garbage is the first book to examine the detritus of Western culture in full range—not only material waste and ruin, but also residual or "broken" knowledge and the lingering remainders of cultural thought systems. Scanlan considers how Western philosophy, science, and technology attained mastery over nature through what can be seen as a prolonged act of cleansing, as scientists and philosophers weeded out incorrect, outmoded, or superseded knowledge. He also analyzes how disposal not only produces overwhelming mountains of waste, but creates dead bits of useless knowledge that permeate the reality of modern Western societies. He argues that physical and intellectual debris reveal new insights into the basic tenets of Western culture and, ultimately, that the abject reality of our disposable lives has led to us becoming the "garbage" of our times.
208 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 6, 2021
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...
February 6, 2018
كتاب عظيم جداً . أنصح به
January 20, 2021
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.
September 17, 2021
كتاب جميل، عميق بمواضيع فلسفية عدة، قد يستلزم أكثر من قراءة واحدة
يدفع القارئ للتفكير والنظر بأمور لا يفكر بها عادة
يدفع القارئ للتفكير والنظر بأمور لا يفكر بها عادة
August 22, 2011
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.
February 27, 2019
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.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews