Editor's Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; Or, Rubbish Ecology

Author(s): Patricia Yaeger

Source: PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Mar., 2008), pp. 321-339
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501857
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12 3-2

Editor's Column: The Death of Nature and

the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology

UVER THE SUMMERISTARTED

TREKKING OF
PAPERS?STACKS
them (extra dissertation chapters, my own rough drafts, other

people's manuscripts)?from my home to the University of

Michigans recycling bins. One day I brought a massive bag of these
materials into the garage, put iton top ofmy car, and thenwent inside
to do e-mail. Hours later, careening out ofmy street, I heard a strange
noise overhead, as if the car were caught up in the beating of swans'

wings. I looked back and saw filaments of papers flying over the car
and along the road: missives to the dissertation gods, my own failed
prose?now kites kicking in thewind. I pulled over and should have

collapsed in despair, since each piece of paper had to be picked up and

put away, but all I saw was an ecstasy of trash.A family of four stopped
to help me collect the papers. They were so worried about
gathering
each one and about how Iwould reorder the sheets once theywere col
lected that I didn't have the heart to say that this paper was useless to
me, headed for recycling and not for endless collation inmy office.
Wall presents a scene in one of his light boxes so
The artist Jeff
similar that one might think I'd staged its unconscious repetition?
except that I'm known inmy family for leaving items on top ofmy
car, including wallets when I pull out of gas stations. Luckily, impos
sibly, the contents are almost always returned, usually the very same
day, as if, thrilled by this vision of potlatch, by these bills and credit
cards skating in the air or in the weeds, even theworst Samaritans
feel the need to return them.
Wall's photograph, A Sudden Gust ofWind (after Hokusai)
(fig. 1), lacks its full luster in reproduction, but when lit up it is daz

zling?so much so that Peter Galassi (who wrote the introduction

toWall's most recent book of photographs) says that he is "at a loss

? 2OO8 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 321

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 12 3-2 Editor's Column 323

to explain" this picture s beauty (43). Business Thirty-Six Views ofMount Fuji (fig. 2). The
papers erupt out of a well-dressed man's le mingling of papers and leaves, the four figures
gal folder with an incomparable lightness of struggling, the smaller figures in the back
being. Reading the photograph from left to ground, the two spindly trees, themountain
right,we see a distant fellow in a red cap toil thatWall displaces with a high, fortresslike
ing inmuddy, orderly cranberry bogs (note building: the Japanese image, too, is about the
the linear white stakes), with a monumental pleasures of loss and trashing?but this plea
building behind him. A ventilated pipe an sure is reserved for thewoodblock s audience
chors the foreground on the left.Read as the and not for the figures who toil through this
first figure in a series, this object appears to windscape. In contrast, inA Sudden Gust of
move through stages of disarray, as if shape Wind Wall asks one of his actors to share the
shifting into the line ofmen to its right. This wind's glee at this spinning and trashing of
cratelike object belongs to a landscape of or humanity's cellulose labors.
der, of parallel lines vigilantly made, when all In this column Iwill focus on theways in
of a sudden?whoosh!?papers, neck scarf, which an old opposition between nature and
coat, trees, leaves, all move from solid to gas, culture has been displaced in postmodern
from dull being to effervescent becoming: art by a preoccupation with trash: the result
from system to systemlessness, order to disor of weird and commodity-based intermin
der, straight lines to lucent, scattered curves. gling. If nature once represented the before
The leaves shed by the spindly oaks mingle (creating culture as child, product, or second
poetically with this rush of paper, while on nature) and ifdetritus represented the after
the upper right a man's hat soars?an antidote (that which was marginalized, repressed, or
to themarching, parallel stolidity of electric tossed away), these representations have lost
lines below. This landscape seems unappeal their appeal. We are born into a detritus
ing, and yet as the happy, hatless man looks strewn world, and the nature that buffets us is
up, as we see rectangular sheets turn into never cultures opposite. Instead, it ismade
by
waste (or triangular paper airplanes: note a wind machine?or compacted with refuse,
the one at the horizon insistently white and ozone, and mercury: themolecular crush of
diagonal against the landscape's horizontal already mingled matter.
brown), the scene jumps into a paean of joy. We encounter thismingling inVik Mu
The happy man's face may be especially niz's giant replica of Caravaggio's Narcissus.
unearthly because of the weird hybridity Munizs installation, a detail ofwhich appears
of the briefcase-carrying man on the left. on the cover, ismade from industrial debris.
Masked by his scarf, turned into a folder Awash in car batteries, treadless tires, broken
head, he becomes a paisley monster spilling fans, rusty sinks?a welter of worthlessness?
the labor of countless hours into the skies. Narcissus stares into a fresh pool of trash. The
The alternation of business and working-class texture of his skin and hair ismechanical; he
men who stray across the light box is equally is in love neither with himself nor with nature
strange, as iffor theworking classes this flight but with the dregs of consumer narcissism; he
of papers offers no epiphany. sees a reflected
subjectivity made out of used
Wall's photograph is, of course, staged. A stuff. In Caravaggio's is
painting, Narcissus
wind machine hums out of sight to the leftof environed by earth and water, separated from
the camera, and themen who struggle against nature's dark pool (fig. 3). But inMuniz's
thewind are posed, poised, in imitation of a is his environment;
photograph Narcissus
nineteenth-century woodcut by Katsushika he looks into and ismade out of a junkworld
Hokusai: Ejiri in Sunshu, from his famous puffed with poisonous particles.

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 324 Editor'sColumn PMLA

E~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~--
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Fig.2
Given this toxicity, how does the photo ture, the term collapses into impermanence
Katsushika Hokusai, the same
graph gain such implausible beauty? Its echo
and history?two ways of saying
Ejiri in Sunshu, 1832 Life-forms are and
ofCaravaggio's composition offers one answer thing. constantly coming
or 1833. Woodcut,
and extinct. Bio
25.2x37.1 cm. ?b. (as if,even in the dump, we can still hear the going, mutating becoming
and are to aris
spheres ecosystems subject
of Cong. spurned nymph's lamentation). But the ob
are a ing and cessation. Living beings do not form
jects constructing thismetallic Narcissus a solid or nonhistorical
prehistorical, ground
strong source of pleasure as well. When I vis
upon which human historyplays. But nature is
itedMuniz's photo at theMuseum ofModern oftenwheeled out to adjudicate betweenwhat is
Art, two young men standing beside me ex fleeting and what is substantial and permanent.

claimed, "There's a battery! There's a chassis!" Nature smoothes over uneven

history, making
and I joined in their glee. In Narcissusy after itsstrugglesand sufferingsillegible. (21)
Caravaggio we find ourselves in themidst of a
This is certainly the case in Ovid's retelling
queer ecology where the distinction between
of theNarcissus myth, where Narcissus's all
organism and environment disappears.
In Ecology without Nature Timothy Mor consuming love turns petal blue, while Echo's
ton insists that we stop romanticizing bios misery becomes a susurrus. A tradition of
and dispense with nature altogether: Nature's obliterating force runs deep in the
Western canon. In contrast,
contemporary
When I suggest thatwe drop the concept of artists likeMuniz refuse to give nature itsdue.
nature, I am
saying that we really drop it.... Instead, his Caravaggio represents "the secret
Ifwe consider the
nontheological
sense of na of suffering curled up inside the very dimen

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123 Editor's Column 325

Fig.3
Caravaggio,
Narcissus, 1597-99?
Oil on canvas, 110 x
92 cm. Galleria
Nazionale d'Arte

Antica, Rome.

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sion of the object" (Morton 161).1As Marjorie did. They cannot yield the same dividends"
Levinson comments, "Lacking an irreducible (117). Displacing nature, waste and debris
and, as itwere, self-perpetuating otherness in provide these dividends in postmodern art;
nature, structurally guaranteeing the ongoing rubbish becomes a strange vale of soul mak

recognition of the human, our transformative ing and creativity.

encounters with the physical environment The essays in this issue also challenge
cannot do the subject-making work they once traditional ways of thinking about nature and

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 326 Editor's Column PMLA

its others. In "Swamp Sublime: Ecologies of The next two essays rehistoricize the bina
Resistance in theAmerican Plantation Zone" ries subject/object, human/animal, and nature/
M. Allewaert suggests that William Bar culture. D. Christopher Gabbard examines
tram's Travels subverts myths ofwhite agency the fate of the "natural fool" in "From Idiot
based on
mastery
over nature. Bartram's Beast to Idiot Sublime: Mental Disability in
swamp writings summon
vegetation-clad JohnCleland's Fanny Hill" Cleland's "simple
Maroons and slaves as militants; his wilder ton," Good-natured Dick, gains the power to
ness of "interpenetrating forces" challenges transcend all labels, since his sexuality makes
an Enlightenment order and abolishes the him sublime and provides a route beyond the
divisions between vegetable, animal, and hu language of disability as well as the imagined
man. In "Those We Don't Speak Of: Indians riftbetween animal and human, able-bodied
in The Village" we tramp beyond Bartram's and disabled. In "Wordsworth and the Eth
swamps to examine a Shaker-like commu ics of Things" AdamPotkay describes the
nity that retreats into a haunted woodland changing etymology of things and locates a
to escape the incursions of the United States Wordsworthian ecosystem without subjects
Fig.4 military-industrial complex. The essay's co or objects. In "Tintern
Abbey" human beings
authors, Lauren Coats, Matt Cohen, John become "things among things" while nature,
Wall, The
Jeff
David Miles, Kinohi Nishikawa, and Rebecca even as it thinks with or beside the human, is
Destroyed Room,
1978. Transparency Walsh, argue that in building this false uto neither abstracted nor personified.
in lightbox, 159 x
pia the villagers construct a wilderness that Jonathan Stone's and Michael Collins's
234 cm. Courtesy of is history euphemized. into modern
essays open species bending
the artist.

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 12 3-2 Editor's Column 327

scientism and the satire of modernity. In wetlands in the eighteenth century, so Ameri
and theAtomic Bakhtin's As cans in the twentieth and
"Polyphony Age: twenty-first centu
similation of an Einsteinian Universe" science ries dwell among sewers and local dumps: the
and literary criticism mingle in Stone's explo machine graveyards and toxic landfills that
ration of Bakhtin's changed relation to Ein plump the heartland. This new swamp sub
steinian physics. How can Dostoevsky, writing lime suggests one of the reasons for the post
in the nineteenth century, already know what modern turn to a detritus aesthetic.
Einstein "discovers" in the twentieth? In "The Ifwaste or rubbish dominates postmodern
Consent of the Governed in Ishmael Reed's art, it is not because an artistic preoccupation
The Freelance Collins analyzes
Pallbearers" with detritus is new (see Our Mutual Friend or
an oblivious, baby-faced America. In Reed's TheWaste Land). But postmodern detritus has
novel nature has disappeared, and civilization unexpectedly taken on the sublimity thatwas
ismade out of shit,harry sam (a dictator who once associated with nature.Wall's photographs
eats the nation's children and whose resulting brim with ne'er-do-wells, derelicts, trashed in
diarrhea clogs the nation's pores) dispenses his teriors, dirt, and junk (including the cache of
wisdom as toy talk, another form of distract Ralph Ellison's "invisible man"). One of his first
ing, logorrhea-like waste, which becomes the installations is The Destroyed Room (fig.4), an
lubricant of state ideology. We return, once elaborately staged cacophony ofwrack and bed
more, to human waste and detritus.2 Just as room rubbish loosely modeled on Delacroix's
Bartram struggled in themorass of the Florida The Death of Sardanapalus (fig. 5). InWall's

Uli

Fig. 5
Eug?ne Delacroix,
The Death of
Sarda na pa Ius, 1827.
Oil on canvas,
392 x496 cm.

? Louvre, Paris,
France/Giraudon /
The Bridgeman
Art Library.

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328 Editor's Column PMLA

photograph Sardanapalus changes into a chest covered counter

shine (fig. 6). Looking at
of drawers, the horse into a doorway, and the the light box itself (as opposed to its repro
young women (surely they are about to be sac duction), we could draw an analogy to Ver
rificed) into slashes in themattress cover,while meer or Velazquez. In Vermeer everything
one woman's breast becomes a
persimmon glows, but unlike Wall's concatenations of
orange hat. The ruddiness of Sardanapalus's trash, Vermeer's interiors are bourgeois and
coverlet oscillates into paint and fiberglass in very clean. InWall's photos the patina that
Wall'swall. The artist first installed this light Vermeer invents for the bourgeois everyday
box in thewindow of theNova Gallery inVan adheres to dirt, slashed mattresses, and milk
couver so that it looked like a department store aggressively spat on the sidewalk. The liquid
window (with all the garish, neon promise of a in his photograph Milk (fig. 7) gathers the
commercial district) announcing that commod same luminous quality as the pearl in Ver
ities always turn into trash or that thewomen meer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (fig. 8).3
who wear these commodities are made furious Briefly perusing the history of what
by (or have been raped because of) the gaze. shines, we can say that for the Romantic poets
In Diagonal Composition Wall makes it is nature, or itspoetic reincarnation in nat
another luminous scene out of near detritus. ural supernaturalism. For Baudelaire and the
Here wadded paper, dirty soap, and a scum urbane nineteenth-century French it is the ev

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 12 3-2 Editor's Column 329

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eryday sublime. For themoderns it is the past; The ruins of Fordism, the economic damage
tradition becomes a source of gleams. But for of lost jobs, old modes of production tossed
contemporary writers and visual artists in the away: this music spins out of theWest's pol
West what gleams ismore shocking. It is de luting chemicals and a century's industrial
bris, detritus: themess and odor of trash. failures.4 Its sources are metal creatures that
Mark Doty is another practitioner of this are "dinged, busted or dumped" and yet con
waste-based art. In "Tunnel Music" he revisits tinue to sing.
the racket of nine "black guys" playing steel If ecology has been defined as the study
drums in Times Square: "metal ripped and of organisms and their environments and has
mauled, /welded and oiled: scoured chemical evolved tomean environmental preservation
drums, / torched rims, unnameable disks of or conservation, then rubbish ecology can be
chrome." Are these drums "artifacts ofwreck? defined as the act of saving and savoring de
The end of industry?" This music echoes bris. In Doty's "Two Ruined Boats" the nar
rator describes the Diane S., a wrecked boat
[a] century's failures reworked, bent, covered with "crocus tones, layers and layers /
hammered out, struck till their shimmying the colors in the old Woolworth's watercolor
tumbles and ricochets from tile walls:
boxes" (89). Near the prow he pauses over a

anything dinged, busted or dumped jonquil-lettered sign proposing the boat's re

can be beaten till it sings. (70) pair and a quick jaunt to China:

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 330 Editor's Column PMLA

the artist has a similar response but ismoved

(sometimes to ecstasy) by serial commodifi
cation's throwaways?by trash or debris. The
green ecology associated with nature remains
fascinating, elusive, charged with metaphysi
.. i sho cal wonder and a new fragility brought on
....,i*...
,.!t;ws
:g,jilX
iri9
*So
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by global warming. But for a large group of

*:i;
'a: ...:.vi.t writers and artists junk (and the rhapsode's
work of transforming it into art) turns out to
_ .
be more fascinating. As in Robert Smithson's
...:
_
spiral jetty, visual and verbal artists concoct
..8.
.;S_
a passion not just formud and rock ("Rolled
.. s__
...?G.3,
._ round in earth's diurnal course") but also for

things that have busted or rusted.

'. j
:9;.Xt2}'+-os?t\W.2
_
In T. S. Eliot's Waste Land the detritus of
industrialism clogs the Thames. Eliot shores
. ..
S
- ''.X. up his aesthetic by using fragments from the
r..|.
poetic past, but the rags and soda bottles of
W .. id
* ' :: S his present seem like useless and degraded
.. : .. . . t>wa
ephemera. In contrast, the American visual
artistMark Dion spentmuch of 1999 creating
an installation focused on river detritus. He

deployed a team of Londoners who

.': . . ' )
,,.jy2,,1j
....
y,.-
'' combed the foreshore of the Thames at low
two stretches one near
tide along of beach,

what is now T?te Britain, and the other at the

site thatwould become T?te Modern the fol

Fig.8 I would,
myself, year. The team collected
lowing large quanti
JanVermeer, Girl
avoid that passage: this decline's
ties of items, including clay pipes, shards of
with a Pearl Earring,
c. 1665. Oil on too steep to fix, and my art delftware, oyster shells and plastic toys. In this
Dion's are pre
could articulate the sheen, display, findings meticulously
canvas, 44.5 x only
or chronicle the fashion inwhich sented in an old-fashioned cabinet,
39 cm. Mauritshuis, mahogany

The Hague. alongside photographs of the beachcombers

The world gains lusteras itfalls apart. (89) and tidal flow charts. items sit to
Antique

gether with contemporary ephemera, prompt

Once again the shattered object becomes lumi to create their own narratives
ing the viewer
nous, epiphanic. If this seems odd now, itmay across time and to
question assumptions about
seem normal in a hundred years. Did anyone value and disposability. ("T?teModern")
ask the Romantics why theywere interested
in nature? Responding to an Enlightenment This enshrining of rubbish in a huge curio
certainty about natural laws, their wavering cabinet, where the seventeenth or eighteenth
obsessions moved the music of the spheres century might have placed artifacts of what
into the everyday. And yet this "Nature" was were, for them, raw or naturalistic cultures
never about the thing itself but about the alongside curiosities of nature, echoes the hy
ability of the subject to be moved by what it pothesis that trash has become a material for
sees. In the trashy post-World War II world enacting the exultations of an older sublime.

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 12 3.2 Editor's Column 331

The feelings of aesthetic election that used to and then ended in gravel and weeds." Like
come from excursions through the Simpl?n Wordsworth's halted traveler, Glassic feels
Pass now come from
confronting
residue. swallowed up, albeit by a seedier nature, and
Let me be particular. In The Prelude then spit out again. Met with a "monumental,
Wordsworth tramps through the Alps, takes sunset burning in the heights," he "thought
a wrong turn, and learns from a passerby that he was hallucinating an Arizona butte" (183).
he has already passed the summit and needs In this salty nature, an awkward amalgam
to go down, not up. Instead of reaching for a ofMarlboro country and Sierra Club kitsch,
map, Wordsworth celebrates his paradoxical he stumbles upon the telos or endpoint of all
empowerment and releases himself tomiddle simulacra, upon an apocalypse made out of
vision. In a much anthologized epiphany, thrown-away things. Instead of beholding
"Imagination
... like an unfathered vapour" an Arizona butte, the Simpl?n Pass, orMont
rises before him and throws off streams of Blanc, Brian Glassic finds himself on Staten
metaphor as if to enwrap "some lonely trav Island facing the Fresh Kills landfill.
eller" (6.592-96). Orphaned in nature, en
Looking forNature, Wordsworth finds
countering the power of his own brand of themind's grand uncertainties. Looking for
longing, the poet discovers a vast oversoul New York City, Brian Glassic finds itsdemise.
in "the immeasurable height /Of woods de "Itwas science fiction and prehistory, garbage
caying, never to be decayed, /The stationary arriving twenty-fourhours a day, hundreds of
blasts ofwaterfalls" (624-26). In The Prelude workers, vehicles with metal rollers compact
are
ing the trash, bucket augers digging vents for
these oxymorons emblems, emanations of

a mind or a face, "blossoms upon one tree; / methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a
Characters of the great Apocalypse" (637 line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter"
38). This is gorgeous, contradictory verse, in (184). Here we have the twentieth century's
which Wordsworth declares the lineaments version of the vast: pig trucks and bucket au
of his election as poet.
gers rooting for carbon.
To discover a budding apocalypse in na Like Wordsworth in nature, Glassic re
ture is one thing, but to find itblossoming in covers a sense of
authority or election in this
a landfill is quite another. In Don DeLillo's eroded and junk-filled environment. A waste
Underworld Brian Glassic, waste expert and consultant, "he saw himself for the first time
baseball fan, takes a trip entirely unlike Words as a member of an esoteric order, theywere
worth's, but he ends up in much the same
adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city
place. After visiting a purveyor of baseball planners, the waste managers, the compost
memorabilia (exhausted objects and ninth the
technicians, landscapers would build
dreams), he drives through New
inning pipe hanging gardens here, make a park one day
lersey looking forNew York City. Everywhere out of every kind of used and lost and eroded
he is assaulted by simulacra; cars, planes, cig
object of desire" (185).
arettes, even the people, are twinned by bill Not only is the power ofwaste at the center
boards and replicas thatmake theworld seem of contemporary literature, not only does de
tight, claustrophobic, autoreferential. And tritus replace nature, but waste managers and
then Glassic repeats Wordsworth's story; he garbage haulers are its poets and purveyors,
gets lost and stumbles into ecstasy. Missing a its historians and makers. "We designed and
turnoff just before Newark Airport, he lands
managed landfills," Nick says in Underworld:
"on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncer

tainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey We were waste brokers. We

arranged ship
edge of brine in the air and the road bent ments of hazardous waste across the oceans

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 332 Editor's Column PMLA

of theworld. We were theChurch Fathers of yellow

caution tags. Handle carefully. Even
waste in all its transmutations. I almost men the lowesthousehold trash is closely observed.
tioned my line ofwork to [the artist] Klara People look at their garbage differentlynow,
Sax when we had our talk in the desert. Her seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a

planetary context. (88)

own career had been marked at times
by her
methods of transformingand absorbing junk.
me wary.
Why might detritus replace nature as a means
But made I didn't want
something
her to think Iwas implying some affinityof of exploring change, mutability, depth, and
effortand perspective. (102)
the thrill ofmetaphysical quest?
First, in a world where molecular garbage
DeLillo the similarity between
presses rub
has infiltrated earth, water, and air,we cannot
bish collecting and aesthetics:
encounter the natural untouched or uncon

Fig.9 taminated by human remains. Trash becomes

We were waste waste we
managers, giants,
universal waste. Waste has a sol
nature, and nature becomes trash. In Karen Tei
JudyGarland, processed
Jack Haley, and emn aura now, an
aspect of untouchability. Yamashita's Through theArc of theRainforest
Ray Bolger in The White containers of plutonium waste with entomologists search for a rare butterfly in a
Wizard of Oz (1939). metal cemetery crowded with discarded ma
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' *. _ chines from the 1950s and 1960s. F-4 Phan
_S,<,__:.
s_ [' ..:.. Wt*_ t
-S. _,.. Aa -
_E.
__
__.
_<
. _ ...'.
toms, Huey Cobras, Dodges, and Cadillacs
_F_
ve . EG
_.,
__!.
- _S
rB t *Xt
- s;.r_-
:' -
_E : ?9i
,., e.. :_
Ss_
1
lI9
i
crumble "into a fine rusty dust." The butter
IS
a_S | as.
...
_EiB iilE _ llI RS?_
N S.!SS
flypupates in the vinyl seats of disintegrating
:.:s.
:.-_
t|!8?SSw.
.s_x _w1
P 1 7l .,..,-i
i.. F
s- @ES'
:^' I _ Chevrolets, itsdelicate orange produced by "hy
. 's eCtS . . I_
_w_ drated ferricoxide, or rustywater" (100). These
ilw.
_E
::: s:$!ii.@:.S_
_
n
oj:: .:..:....
@ .. w-S
'wS.
':'S#! :s_'v__
_.-8wS
...': ..':
. wa _siXe ! ! !'. 7 . : insects have evolved to feed on metal detritus,
gP.S'S : r:So
M SW .^S
' ..r!. _ . :S
r:.:;.v.hoh ..!S
as have families ofmice with chartreuse coats.
E

: :., .o_S
. ^:4:
They devour chipping, lead-based paint, while
..ea:S
.se!!MES
:!F
ff
.........................................
:^,.m<.':
.,*;
-
fa_S
_
.......................................
?.._
_A
.,._SSSll[s
._?
.4fl
m.:?7E.::
.........................................
e
_vXS ..:
new forms of
_._s
.. t epiphytes cling to disintegrating
*!S_:mS
.a.
*-S_ .
R on vehicles and feed rare, ferrous insects.
:. 1'
_^ .:::: :
'.:j.Ji
*:::..
'.'_ Second, in the decades following World
.:
x< :''&
- SW ; r s
___k.,/
_.s War II, the pedigree of rubbish changes as we
enter an era where the new is almost instantly
.. .... _. obsolete, and objects that would once have
been kept and repaired?computers, shoes,
toasters, TVs?are replaced as soon as they
look old-fashioned or start to break down. If
prewar culture celebrates the friendly preser
vation ofmechanical characters like the dam

aged Tin Man in The Wizard ofOz (fig.9), in

late-twentieth-century films we witness the

programmed death of cyborgs inRidley Scott's

Blade Runner (fig. 10) or Steven Spielberg's Arti

ficial Intelligence:A.l. America shiftsfrom a cul

ture ofmaintenance to a culture of discards.5
For a culture of discards to displace a cul
ture ofmaintenance in late capitalism is not so

surprising. But in an economy where recycling

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 12 3-2 Editor's Column 333

Fig. 10
Rutger Hauer in
Blade Runner ^9S2).

and the transformation of trash into rawmate beautify our world. Trees help clean the air
rials isparamount, itdoes seem surprising that of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.
art takes such pleasure in unprocessed debris. As North America's largest recycler, last year
As DeLillo says in Underworld, "[I]t looked as alone Waste Management recycled enough
if something happened in the night to change paper to save over forty-one million trees.
the rules ofwhat is thinkable" (599). . . . Think Think Waste
green. Manage
Given these changing rules, can we dis ment" (fig. 11). Another Waste Management
tinguish between trash, nature, and culture,
which once seemed distinct? A commercial by
Waste Inc., shows a a Frame from
Management, huge gar

bage truck following winding roads through a commercial

greenery that looks like an old-growth forest; byWaste

this scene appears both prehistoric and hy Management, Inc.

pertouristic. The driver communes with a fly

ing dove, which condenses the freedom of the
forest, a sign of peace, and an echo of extinct
passenger pigeons. A voiceover comforts us:
"This lush, expansive green does more than

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334 Editor'sColumn I PMLA

commercial shows a landfill turned into a na changes from durable to transient. No won
ture preserve with hollows and lakes offering der Derrida's "trace," Adorno's "remainder,"
habitat forhappy ducks ("Advertisements"). Is and Zizek's "das Ding" suggest the leftover as
this nature, or culture, or waste, or all three? both the undoing of dialectics and the very
Earth artists like Smithson preserve the thing we must address.
circulation of trash as the residue of culture Still, ifSmithson finds the detritus of cul
and nature; for him the terms cease to be ture and decay of nature nearly synonymous

separate. As Michael Kimmelman says, Spi and Adorno and Walter Benjamin announce
ral Jettyfunctions like an outdoor sign point the death of nature, how do we determine

ing visitors toward the horizon, "where there which nature has decayed or died? Is it a bi
is not just nature to look at but also rusting nary, metanarrative nature that opposes the
cars and a decrepit pier. An ancient sea and artificial and depends on a forever metasta
industrial ruin, 'the site,' as Smithson wrote, sizing antagonism between a "natural" world
was 'evidence of a succession of man-made and civilization? Is it the Puritan's nature: a

systems mired in abandoned hopes.' His fas space inferior to spirit, the infernal wilder
cination was with the grandeur of such in ness that white Anglo settlers fled into and
dustrial decay, from which he came." James then fled from? Is it an Enlightenment nature
Corner adds that "Smithson was the one who promising an orderly universe, themistress
worked with geological processes, crystalli of laws and theorems and teacher of an ethi
zation processes, growth processes and also cal humanity? Or is it a post-Darwinian na

entropy.... He didn't only think of processes ture in which even the fittest can no longer
as producing something but also as decaying survive? Have we killednot just nature as
and becoming something else. That's a very matter but also nature as myth or essence,
as metaphysical fundament ("a motion and
significant insight" (qtd. in Lubow 52).
In Minima Moralia Theodor Adorno a spirit, that impels /All thinking things ...
adds to this category confusion by insisting And rolls through all things" [Wordsworth,
that nature exists only in the presence of de "Lines," lines 100-02]): the source of deeply
bris. Herefuses to be nostalgic about extinct held ideas about human nature? Or does "the

woolly mammoths and other exotica that death of nature" refer to a cataclysm, to the
once stalked the earth. Ifwe yearn for the death of nature as environment and to earth's

power of these lost beasts, it is to access a vi sixth extinction?

talitywe have sapped from the earth (115-16). Fredric Jameson argues that "nature has
For Adorno nature is so striated and circum at last been effectively abolished" from "the
of late
scribed that it only exists askance, in grubby wholly built and constructed universe
urban corridors where decay suppurates the capitalism." Meanwhile, "human praxis?in
new. As Nick the waste man the degraded form of information ... ?has
edges of the
ager says in Underworld, "I walk through penetrated older autonomous spheres of cul
the house and look at the things we own and ture and even theUnconscious itself, theUto
no place to
feel the odd mortality that clings to every ob pia of a renewal of perception has
ject. The finer and
rarer the object, themore go" (121-22). The "whole" of Raymond Wil
me feel, and I don't know how liams's "a whole way of life" is out the door
lonely itmakes
to account for this" (804). Possessing a sur (xviii). Similarly, Adorno insists that "the
more purely nature is preserved and trans
plus that is empty, a plenitude that is already
more implacably
blank: this is the bare life of the commodity. planted by civilization, the
Desire gives the unpurchased object a charge, it is dominated. We can now afford to encom
but once purchased the object drains or pass ever larger natural units, and leave them

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 12 3.2 Editor's Column 335

apparently intact within our grasp, whereas debris. As Arthur Lubow reported in theNew
previously the selecting and taming of par York Times, Latz "recognized that the genius
ticular items bore witness to the difficultywe loci of a postindustrial park can reside in blast
still had in coping with nature. ... Only in furnaces and drainage ditches, just as for an
the irrationality of civilization itself, in the 18th-century English garden itwas found in
nooks and crannies of the cities ... can na wooded groves and cascading streams" (48).
ture be conserved" (115-16). Scientists also Latz built Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord
have their say: a 1998 survey by theAmerican in East Germany, inspired by the "industrial
Museum of Natural History found that "70% rubble of bombed-out Saarland"?first a war
of biologists view the present era as part of a torn and now a deindustrialized zone. This is
mass extinction event," theHolocene extinc an amusement park that uses World War II
tion, perhaps the fastest such event to have and thewaste of industrialism as playing field.
ever occurred. The For Latz restoring a so-called natural order
sociobiologist E. O. Wil
son predicted that human destruction of the seemed ludicrous: "this situation is highly ar
biosphere was likely to result in extinctions tificial. Everyone knows that the cherry trees
of "one-half of all species in the next 100 are not woods, not natural. This
place has
years" ("Extinction Event"). Jean-Bernard nothing to do with untouched nature" (51).
Ouedraogo adds that colonial pr?dation is a Walking through the park with Latz,
mode of ecological pr?dation. Africa, "which Lubow felt "a melting away inmy mind of the
possessed the richest biotopes in the world, distinction between what is natural and what
has undergone a form of genetic decay, while is artificial.... The hills rising above the flat
theWest had developed [itsown] gene banks terrain were not volcanic deposits or sedi
from the precious wild varieties" (26). mentary upthrusts: theywere heaps of slag,
And here we come to a paradox. Which the highly alkaline residue of the iron-making
ever nature is
dying, the green world is a dis process, on which wild buddleias sprouted
appearing medium highly valued in theWest, and pussy willows had been planted." Haw
while debris and rubbish are at the opposite thorn hedges grow there '"naturally' ...
end of the spectrum, the dregs of value. We because they seemed to be resistant to the
have learned to view biological ecosystems herbicides thatwere used for decades to sup
as
scarcity, as environments lost to agricul press weeds along the railroad tracks" (52).
tural and industrial imperialism. Our society Why trash now? First, because residue is
a way of
haunting the commodity. Detritus is
creates and then disavows rubbish in excess.

Detritus is objects?both natural and artifi the opposite of the commodified object?new,
cial?that have reached the end of their life sleek, just off the assembly line, already losing
of value. Given this opposition, why should its value as we walk out the store. Trash has a
the dominant aesthetic response to trash sug
history, about the object as it is individuated
gest thatwe need to revalue it, to soak up its and the object as itdecays or enters entropy.6
numina, its radioactive glow? In Doty's "A Letter from the Coast" the poet
While rubbish ecology and the aestheti watches Provincetown become a commodity
cization of trash may seem counterintuitive
paradise for gaymen. In "a veritable cyclone /
(and at times unethical in a world where of gowns and wigs" and rooms full of
glitter,
brownfields and colossal dumps swallow the everyone dreams of crossing over, accoutred
poor), artists and architects have embraced with dresses, seed-pearl veils, and show
the globe's junkyards as their own, often heal accessories. When a hurricane threat
girl
ing them in the process. Peter Latz, a German ens, a man hauls a boat named Desire onto
architect, creates parks celebrating industrial the shore. Afterward the narrator, snug and

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336 Editor'sColumn PMLA

philosophical, uses the storm's sediment to military-industrial complex, to the political

meditate on the desires of our era: portrait of the invisible man in the subsub
basement of a New York tenement?his 1,369
The law of the tide is accumulation, More, with wires culled
lightbulbs strung together
and our days here are layereddetail, from a local junkman. These proliferating fan
the shore's mosaic of detritus:
grand tasias may borrow the conventions of realism,
tumbled beach glass, endless bits as inDeLillo s portrait of the Fresh Kills land
of broken china, as ifwhole nineteenth fill, or theymay be sci-fi and countercultural,
centurykitchens as inWilliam Gibson's Virtual Light, where
went down in theharbor and lie the earthquake-torn Bay Bridge becomes a
scattered favela of creativity litteredwith squatter busi
at our nesses and pilfered lean-tos. In Virtual Light
feet, the tesserae of Byzantium.

Those syllables sounded all night, the good guys celebrate trash, squalor, and
their meaning neither completed
nor inventive recycling; they detest the bourgeois
exhausted. (33-34) "upcycled" economy, where growing skyscrap
ers eat their own rubbish. For Gibson's bridge
Baudelaire's everyday comes back as remains, dwellers, trash space is sacred. The denizens of
as trash: the sublime never-endingness of the destroyed Bay Bridge make do with main
spent objects. If old modes of production can stream culture's leftovers; electricity ispilfered
be recycled as steel drums, if a wrecked boat from rich people's air streams. As rain silvers
gleams as it falls apart, in Doty's "A Letter the "scavenged surfaces" of plywood sheets
from the Coast" bits wasted by the Industrial and "broken marble from thewalls of forgot
Revolution, by Fordism and post-Fordism, ten banks," a Japanese anthropologist seats
wash up, as if these one-time products are himself at a long counter and looks "toward
filled with innumerable beauties that become Oakland, past the haunted island, thewingless
more dazzling as they break apart. Doty envi carcass of a 747 [that] housed the kitchens of
sions a world of bits?where everything made nine Thai restaurants" (70-71). The bridge, a
comes back to haunt us. Beyond this, he sees vision of singing wires and ramshackle boxes,
as archae simmers with danger and camaraderie. It is
people with their loads of products
are layered de
ological sites. "Our days here light-filled, life-giving, carnivalesque.
tail," our seasons weighted with what we have Third, trash has a history of moving in

bought. After World War II, after Vietnam, and out of the circle of exchange?impor
the speedup of serial commodification has tant to nineteenth-century rag pickers and
built a world out ofmore. vendors, hoarded but secretly cast away by
Second, trash becomes attractive in re the government (despite the war machine's
War II.
bellion against Enlightenment dialectics. emphasis on salvage) during World
is ruled As master circulators and connoisseurs of
("Bourgeois society by equivalence,"
and Horkheimer. "It makes the trashed objects, men are protagonists
say Adorno junk
to ab
by reducing it
dissimilar in numerous modern or texts,
comparable postmodern
stract quantities" [7].)An excessive interest in from Louise Erdrich's Antelope Wife to Ches
detritus corresponds to a refusal of the similar. ter Himes's Cotton Comes toHarlem, Julie
Trash gains a fine particularity in an explosion Alvarez's Dreaming Cuban, Ellison's Invisible
of post-1945 literary texts. These visionary Man, Lesley Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and
scenes of detritus range from the capricious or Gibson's Virtual Light. Real trash collectors
whimsical, as in Yamashita's evolving plants were heroes in the 1960s during the garbage
and animals that feed on the remains of the strike that brought Martin Luther King, Jr.,to

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 12 3-2 Editor's Column 337

fn?i??m-*
HMtmr

Fig. 12
Memphis, where he was assassinated (fig. 12). egances that Sylvie brought home forus was National Guard
InMarilynne Robinson's Housekeeping the to be allowed its season.
Sylvie,
on her side, soldiers watch as
inhabited a millennial present. To her the
orphaned girls' hobo aunt, Sylvie, is a trash Memphis sanitation
deteriorations of were a fresh
collector par excellence. Her parlor fills with things always workers strike, Apr.
a not to be dwelt
empty cans and old bottles, with newspapers surprise, disappointment 1968. ? Bettmann/
on. However a or week's use have Corbis.
and magazines, with remnants of dead swal day's might
maimed thevelvet bows and plastic belts, the
lows and sparrows brought into the house by
atomizers and gilt dresser sets, the scalloped
thirteen hungry cats. "Who would think of
nylon gloves and angora-trimmed anklets,
...
sweeping the cobwebs down in a room
Sylvie always brought us treasures. (93-94)
used for storage of cans and newspapers,

things utterlywithout value? Sylvie kept them In this struggle to maintain the beauty of
... because she considered accumulation to
uselessness, Sylvie and Ruthie try to burn
be the essence of housekeeping" (180). Sylvie down their house and run away from the dis
shops for entropy:
approving fathers of Fingerbone. They want
the domestic, detritus-filled world to collapse
Sylvienever bought thingsof thebest quality,
in flames, to be made, like the sled in Citizen
not because she was close with money... but
because the five-and-dime to her Kane, into luminous trash.
only catered
taste for the fanciful.Lucille ground her teeth Fourth and finally, scenes of waste and
when Sylvie set out shopping. detritus dominate texts because our episte

mologies are shifting.Morton plays with these

... Ruffles wilted, sequins fell, satin was

epistemologies in Ecology without Nature. He

to clean. None of the little el
impossible

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338 Editor'sColumn PMLA
[

as standing in for an idea of the natural. Deep

argues that fantasies of nature as "beauti ecology
goes to extremes on this point, insisting that humans are
ful soul" must give way to an embrace of the
a viral supplement to an organic whole." Instead, he ar
toxic: "Instead of trying to pull theworld out
gues, we should join other "slimy things" and recognize
of themud, we could jump down into themud that "we ourselves are 'tackily' made of bits and pieces of
...
ecological criticism must politicize the
stuff. The most ethical act is to love the other precisely
in their artificiality, rather than seeking to prove their
aesthetic. We choose this poisoned ground.
naturalness and authenticity" (195-96).
We will be equal to this senseless actuality.
2. Human waste and household and industrial rubbish
not
Ecology may be without nature. But it is have very different valences. But in a culture where human
without us" (205). I have been arguing that the beings have become walking commodities, where costumes,
more ethi sports gear, and transportation make people intomobile cy
binary trash/culture has become
and magazines,
borg logos, Iwould argue that newspapers
cally charged and aesthetically interesting than toaster ovens and computers are shed from homes, bodies,
the binary nature/culture. In a world where or businesses like somuch dandruff. We have become what
nature is dominated, polluted, pocketed, eco we buy, and we shed commodity selves as easily (or as com

touristed, warming, melting, bleaching, dissi plexly) as we shed bits from

our biomass.

3. Galassi comments at length on Wall's to

pating, and fleeing toward the poles?detritus homage
Vermeer, and other old masters (28-55).
is both its curse and its alternative. Trash is Velazquez,
4. This is reminiscent of the cracked lapis inWilliam
the becoming natural of culture, what culture, re
Butler Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," where imperfection
eating nature, tries to cast away. In themidst sults in a perfect work of art: "Every discoloration of the
of simulacra, it is also a substance inwhich we stone, /Every accidental crack or dent, / Seems a water

can encounter decay and mortality. In Under course or an avalanche" (293). The difference is that for
Yeats the crack is transformed intomeaning, made part of
world even the sublime recycling machines
the carving's mimesis. In contrast, in "Two Ruined Boats"
cannot discipline the dangerous, wavering a love of the ruined in and for itself.
Doty describes
beauty of our carbon footprints: 5. In "What Else Is New" Shapin describes
Steven a
He
radically different dynamic in the developing world.
to
Brightness streams from skylights down cites John Powell's The Survival of theFitter: Lives of Some
a study of vehicle-repair shops in
thefloor of the shed, falling from the tallma African Engineers (1995),
chines with a numinous flow. Maybe we feel a Ghana, where, Powell explains, as a vehicle imported from
the developed world starts to decay, it "is reworked in the
reverence for waste, for the redemptive qual
local system" until "it reaches a state of apparent equi
ities of the we use and discard, look
things librium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely.
how they come back to us, alightwith a kind ... It is a condition of maintenance of constant repair."
of brave aging. The windows yield a strong Shapin adds that the developing world devotes massive
enormous "an ingenuity that is
sky. The
broad desert and land energy to "cre?le"technologies,
fillacross the road is closed now, jammed to us only because we happen to live in a
largely invisible to

capacity, but gas keeps rising from the great

low-maintenance, high-throwaway regime" (148).

it produces a 6. Bill Brown notes in "How toDo Things with Things

earthen berm, methane, and
to
across (a Toy Story)," "Misuse frees objects from the systems
wavering the land and sky that deep
which they've been beholden" (953). Objects may sud
ens the aura of sacred work. It is like a fable
a or in trash art, be
denly become visible in trash heap
in thewrithing air of some ghost civilization, cause they have ceased (at least momentarily) to function
a shimmer of desert ruin. (809-10) within an economic apparatus.

PatriciaYaeger
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