Abandoned: Memories of Waste, 2018-2020

Any academic writing on ‘waste’ must, first and foremost, reflect upon its own status apropos the concept of ‘waste.’

How does one write on ‘waste,’ especially within the space of the neo-liberal academy which expects its participants to produce quite incessantly without making waste? And furthermore, isn’t there a fundamental irony here to which we should be attuned before undertaking any writing on waste―the irony of making waste productive by theorizing it? It almost makes one wonder if making productive-waste would have even been possible in any other epoch before the time, before our time, of late capitalism? However, at the same time and on the other hand, one should also ask precisely the opposite question: what is not today a wasteful enterprise? From ‘things’ to ‘humans,’ late capitalism has made everything reducible, discardable, or in other words, a complete waste. We live in a world where the fate of refugees and plastic bottles converge uncannily―both end up in the ocean, some on the surface while others at the bottom.  

Walter Benjamin, in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, writes about “wreckage[s]” and “debri[s]” that emerge in the wake of the “storm” that is [historical] “progress.” As with most of Benjamin’s writings, these ‘theses’ contain multitudes of conceptual kernels dispersed throughout the text. Yet, even in all the conceptual sophistication that the texts embody, it would not be wrong to say that Benjamin’s ‘wreckages’ and ‘debris’ were of an altogether different order than the one we, in the catastrophic 21st century, find ourselves in. From the electronic ‘debris’ that gets dumped in the African continent [for example in Ghana] to the waste economy that has emerged in Southeast Asia [in places like Malaysia and the Philippines], garbage has emerged as a new global-historical force. It generates a segment of the national economy that is sustained at the cost of voluntarily importing climate ‘wreckages’ from the Global North. If Benjamin’s angel bore witness to a single catastrophe that continuously piled wreckage upon wreckage and hurled it in front of his feet, the people of the Global South now occupy the angel’s place. They witness not one but multiple catastrophes in the wake of accumulating mountains of garbage—garbage that, to use Benjamin’s imaginary, is literally hurled at their feet. 

However, even amidst the universal presence of waste, we are far from understanding what status waste has in our day-to-day life, apart from being a mere residue that ‘simply’ gets produced. Where within the symbolic field of our social sphere does ‘waste’ reside? For most of us, our garbage simply disappears like ‘magic’ [à la Marcel Mauss] from our day-to-day lives. I can see objection towards the hyperbolic use of the word “disappear” ― after all, most of us do come across overflowing curbside bins, or those one-in-every-six-months newspaper editorials informing us on the rise in waste production per capita with grand images of landfills. Many of us also witness our unhoused neighbors rummaging through garbage bins in search of recyclables that can be resold. Yet waste, both that which we produce every day and that which surrounds us, does not seem to interrupt the horizon of our lives. I have yet to meet a person who wakes up feeling overwhelmed by the waste they produce in a week. If such is our predicament, it is pertinent to ask whether waste can reside within the socio-symbolic world that we inhabit, or whether waste, like the Lacanian ‘Real,’ can only exist at the paradoxical site of a certain extimacy to the socio-symbolic sphere, structuring it and yet absent from it? What happens to objects as they pass from being an object-of-utility to a useless-, and thus wasteful-, one? Or, at an even more fundamental level, maybe the question that should be formulated is the good old Kantian one but with a slight change: Was ist Abfall? [i.e. what is waste?] 

The images that follow are all photographs of waste objects found on the streets of Toronto. I began this project, Abandoned, after encountering a broken toy one late winter night at a bus stop. It was a sad yet fruitful encounter to find a plaything that probably belonged to a toddler somewhere in the city but now had no owner and was soon to be on its way to a landfill with the arrival of the city cleaners who came in the early hours of the morning. Shortly after encountering this first object, I began noticing abandoned items all over the city―there were shoes, winter gloves, women’s crossbody purses, beer bottles, umbrellas, caps, drug syringes, grocery trolleys, ripped books, a Mario soft toy, wheelchairs…the list goes on. In my notes at the time, I wrote: “What is it that drives us to abandon, forget, forsake, or leave personal objects in public spaces? And what happens to those forgotten/abandoned/wasted objects as they continue to exist in spite of us? Can these objects be considered to ‘exist’ if they are abjected out of everyone’s lives, out of their symbolic spaces? And if they do, what is the ‘state’ in which they exist as they lie at the border of public and private, operative and obsolete?” I do not know to what extent my photo project was able to encapsulate and respond to these questions. I welcome you to be the judge.  

To close, I would like to return to the irony of ‘making waste productive’ with which I began this essay. To the extent that I took and archived these photographs, it would be dishonest of me to claim that I elided the above-mentioned irony. And yet, as I offer you these images of found abandoned objects, I offer them with the hope that they might function as sites where the distinction between ‘productivity and ‘waste’ is suspended.