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Document Type
Book Chapter
Department/Program
English
Publication Date
12-24-2002
Book Title
Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield
Editor
Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke
City
Lanham, Maryland
First Page
73
Last Page
83
DOI
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742576049/Culture-and-Waste-The-Creation-and-Destruction-of-Value
Abstract
Twentieth-century culture is obsessed with waste. We worry about whether or not to recycle it, how to dispose of it, whether it is safe, and what will happen to it when we have finally got rid of it. Detritus has its own taxonomy: “rubbish,” “garbage,” and “litter,” for example, construct it as an essentially random, cumulative phenomenon, a by-product of our daily domestic lives. To call something “waste,” on the other hand, is to invoke its history. Nuclear waste, bodily waste, and medical waste are all the result of specific processes: they gesture back to the productive economies that generated them. Even in these days of recycling, waste is almost always disposed of or repudiated, sometimes indifferently, sometimes contemptuously, and even, on occasion, violently.
ISBN
978-0742519824
Recommended Citation
Raitt, S. (2002). Psychic waste: Freud, Fechner and the principle of constancy. Gay Hawkins and Stephen Muecke (Ed.), Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value (pp. 73-83). Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbookchapters/11
