°Waste
I’ve been meaning to post a bit of (and re-read) Mary Catherine Foltz’s excellent “The Excremental Ethics of Samuel R. Delany” (SubStance, 37:2) for some time. Here it be:
Bathrooms speak to me now. This thrice daily flushing, this thrice daily forgetting, is a modern mantra. This song of stream, this drum of dung, and then the whirlpool whip that marks the moment before evacuation from the (water) closet. It is here that we leave our proof of disintegration and return cleansed to labor, to the main rooms of the home, or to the street. Underneath us, as we walk purely forth, our excrement travels, too. Through pipes, it becomes the rivers of an underworld rushing to collection centers for treatment for its filth. Yet, this process fails; no matter how many chemicals we use to destroy this stink from our bodies, something remains. It is not possible to rid ourselves of our excess. […]
We pay for this pleasurable fantasy of freedom from the waste of ourselves. The push of the handle makes the sound of metal on metal, coin in slot. We pay to be relieved of this burden, these reminders of the porous flesh. We pay to forget and to believe in our wholeness, our cleanliness. We pay to avoid the mess. Yet, these capitalist crappers only provide a myth of burial; the rejectamenta of our bodies rushes away only to be returned to us through the rivers from which we drink.
[…] Samuel Delany writes The Mad Man (1994) as an intervention into these standard practices of waste management, and jars the reader from her understanding of this crisis of waste. Instead of calling for greater cleanliness or further vigilant innovation in the “war” against contamination and filth, he gives us a radical, scatological imperative that forces us to think about our interactions with waste. Refusing the standard liberal discourse that bemoans the litter of consumer culture, bleeds sympathy and longs for the re-incorporation of the wounded city scavenger, and sterilizes and disembodies the extreme ethics of deceased philosophers (like Foucault), Delany reveals the pleasure of reveling in the flotsam of late capitalism. For him, ethics is not prohibition, nor does it revolve around the normalizing impulse (hygienic cleansing) of the sciencia sexualis outlined in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Instead, Delany’s ethic of waste calls for the late capitalist consumer to turn to the landfill, to eat of the leftovers, to enter the anus, and to do something different with shit. Following Diogenes, he has indeed “changed the currency” from the exchange of money for the new product, to the pleasure of living closely with excess and finding sustenance in what many consider to be filth. […]
waste (or the excess of a system) is multiple: the homeless or the human “trash” of the city, the dead, the diseased and dying, the excrement of the body as well as the excess of academic discourses like philosophy. Each of these signifiers into which material is deposited and ordered share a common problem; they are the chaotic material through which hegemonic discourses of physical health, sanity, normalcy, and cleanliness are constructed. In other words, they are the unruly mess that threatens the fantasy of a stable subject. Rather than look to homeless communities for a different way to move in the cityscape, we view them as those bodies that need to be brought back to the labor-force, to be “cured” of the madness that makes them unfit for civil society, and to be made ready to consume products and space with the garnered dollar. If they are ignored and forgotten, instead of treated and prosecuted, they are speedily flushed free from the minds of citizen-subjects bent on participating in the daily hustle. The dead, too, become the material buried beneath the movement of labor for the consumption of land, product and health. Still, they can be resurrected in the service of supporting national, medical or other narratives, which allow the subject to confirm an articulation of self. In terms of excrement, the subject builds the self through the proper elimination of bodily detritus. The porous nature of the body, then, is dammed by the fantasy of subjective wholeness, which is made possible through the payment of monies to waste disposal corporations. Each of these types of excess are the materials that must be brought continually into submission in the dual processes of elimination and construction of singular, whole narratives of identity through a willful forgetting of this perpetual shedding. […]
To be read alongside Todd Meyers’ and Stefanos Geroulanos’ translation of Canguilhem’s “Health: Crude Concept and Philosophical Question” (Public Culture, 20:3). Or perhaps more recent articles such as this: “US toxic asset purge will help Australia: Rudd.”
