(Roughly) Daily

Madeleine Adams on John Scanlan‘s new book The Idea of Waste- On the Limits of Human Life… and on the place of trash in our culture…

… Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.

No Roman subject could have predicted just how enduring an achievement the Cloaca Maxima was: SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, or the Senate and People of Rome—the emblem of ancient Rome) decorates manhole covers and trash cans throughout Rome. European sewer systems of the nineteenth century drew many comparisons to the Cloaca. “And as would be the case much later with the underground tunnels and drains of Paris and London, its concealment had the effect of making it an object of curiosity,” Scanlan notes, “providing it with the allure of a place that held truth or secrets about the life of the city.” The sewers drew admiration from many quarters—photographer Félix Nadar explored Paris’s extensively in the 1860s, and London’s caused a Manchester Guardian reporter to muse three-quarters of a century later: “These tremendous undertakings may very easily be the most lasting memorials of our cities.” “Out of sight out of mind”—yet also: “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” The sense that waste was a thing to be conquered became a transhistorical justification for increasing waste technocracy, but the mysterious underworld of waste has always beckoned to the chthonically inclined.

With the rapid industrialization of the Victorian city came the explicitly progressive urge to submerge its grime. Mudlarks, ragpickers, and sewermen populated London’s new underworld. The sewermen, with their “long greasy velveteen coats, furnished with pockets of vast capacity” for holding money, jewelry, and other cleanable trinkets, were a cut above the mudlarks. Mudlarks, mainly women and children who scavenged on the banks of the Thames, wore “torn garments stiffened up like boards with dirt of every possible description.” But this grime, inspiring contemporary works like Dickens’s Bleak House, covered everything: “Fog everywhere” opens the second paragraph of the novel. For Scanlan, Dickens’s fog is not only the grimy remnant of industrial production; the Lord High Chancellor presiding over the decades-old case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce sits “at the very heart of the fog.” For Scanlan, Dickens’ fog obscured the social apparatus—London’s bureaucracy and class system—thereby keeping the lower stratum from rising out of the perceived muck. Progressive urban projects further ensured class segregation as a matter of aesthetics. Ebenezer Howard’s 1902 Garden Cities of To-Morrow allotted spaces for the healthy and happy middle class, as well as for inebriates and the insane. His “slumless and smokeless” urban plans designed a future city with less (visible) waste.

But interred beneath the gardens of modern progress was mass culture’s growing pile of discarded commodities. Responding to the fragmentation of Europe in the 1930s, Walter Benjamin posited history as an endless accumulation of debris in his Arcades Project, which Scanlan calls a “strange literary waste-book.”…

… All waste goes through cycles of decomposition, buying and selling, or displacement. It was not until the 1970s that the idea of “recycling” appeared in opposition to “disposal.” England’s rag-and-bone collectors formed the economy of recycling before 1970. Rag collectors only appeared after the fourteenth-century popularization of the spinning wheel, which enabled the production of a surplus of rags for the first time in history. Bones were ground into fertilizer, while linen rags were sometimes reused to make linen again, or else they too were returned to the earth (flax makes great fertilizer). But industrialized clothing production in the mid-nineteenth century meant that there were now many different kinds of rags, some with trimmings and linings, some in blended materials. By 1949 these Mr. Krooks had to sort through some seven hundred and fifty grades of rags. “I can tell them in the dark,” Scanlan quotes a collector saying, “but you can still lose out on a deal if you aren’t awake.” By 1970, rag-and-bone collectors had disappeared as recycling became centralized by city haulers and municipal tracking codes. Secondhand stores and eBay keep decentralized recycling—albeit as an economy of trends and “vintage” styles—alive. Despite the “hunter-gatherer impulse” that thrills William Gibson when he clicks eBay’s Seller’s Other Auctions, browsing eBay, antiquing, and thrifting are, for the middle class, a pastime, albeit an eco-friendly one.

The “throwaway society” invented the idea that any commodity could be briefly desired, barely used, and tossed out of sight with impunity. The many tech gadgets you’re supposed to give dad this Father’s Day come with a gift receipt but no reminder that their lithium-ion batteries form centuries of toxic landfill. Dads—well, all people—form a bond with their phones and laptops. Sherry Turkle compares the oneness of tech device and human to “the diabetic [who] feels at one with his glucometer.” “The user who is engaged with their device is probably not given to contemplating the future waste that it creates,” writes Scanlan, “given that they are rather caught up in a permanently unfolding present that arrives on demand, through [our devices’] potentially limitless experiences.” But this constant media stream produces not only dead phones and laptops—it also generates media waste…

Looking for the future in the dustbins of history: “W.A.S.T.E. Not,” from @thebaffler.com‬. Read on…

* Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

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As we grapple with garbage, we might send antique birthday greetings to David George Hogarth; he was born on this date in 1862. An archaeologist, he explored and excavated (1887–1907) in Cyprus, Crete, Egypt, Syria, and Melos… uncovering both the ruins of buidlings and the buried detrius of those civilations. From 1908 until his death in 1927, he was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. 

Hogarth employed T.E. Lawrence on some of his digs, and worked with him during WWI to plan the Arab Revolt— when Lawrence bacame “Lawrence of Arabia.”

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