Garbage in Popular Culture

Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste

Mehita Iqani

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480190
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.

1

Globalization, Consumption, and Media

Why Rubbish Matters

Most people on the planet have two things in common, both deeply embedded in the inescapably material nature of the human condition. The first is that we aspire to accumulate or possess things that, thanks to the power of market exchange in the global neoliberal economy, most often manifest as commodities. The second is that through our use, possession, and eventual utilization of those things, we produce some form of waste, which must then be disposed of. Wherever there is consumption, there is waste.

All people, from the most impoverished to the obscenely wealthy, through the day-to-day and often automatic decisions that we make, acquire things, use them, and throw what’s left of them away. To date, much critical consumer culture theory has devoted attention to questions linked to the accumulation and use of things (be they defined in the material, virtual, or experiential sense). This book aims to understand the culturally shared meanings attached to the detritus that is left behind once consumption has taken place, and thereby to expand our critical thinking both about consumption and about rubbish. By better understanding the two in relation to one another, new insights will be gleaned into the futures of consumption and material culture, the latter increasingly defined by the waste that it creates. Scholars have deployed frameworks from a wide range of disciplines in order to understand what objects mean to people, how and why they acquire and exchange them, and how their consumption practices fit into the bigger picture of a world shaped by the economics of late capitalism. In previous writing, I have contributed to these understandings by revealing the role that media texts, discourses, and narratives play in shaping popular, often “taken-for-granted” ideas about consumption and the individual’s place and role in the neoliberal economy. Some scholars have written about the ethics of consumption and questions of environmental sustainability in relation to consumption (Harrison, Newholm, & Shaw, 2005; Guido, 2009; Barnett et al., 2010; Smart, 2010; Carrier & Luetchford, 2012; Lewis & Potter, 2013), and others have written about the role of waste and garbage in material culture studies, media studies, geography and anthropology, and cultural philosophy (as the rest of this chapter explores in detail). However, not enough theoretical work has yet been done about the role of postconsumer trash in the neoliberal age, and specifically about how that role—or those roles—are narrated in such a way as to enter the popular imagination and shape and define cultural discourse.

This book aims to fill that gap. It focuses on the question of what waste means in relation to consumer culture. More specifically, it asks how popular media narratives about postconsumer waste create and share specific notions about consumption and neoliberal culture. Through this intellectual project, the book makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory, through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Although building on and speaking to much important work in a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary spheres of knowledge, this book is the first to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture, and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. Each of these things has been written about individually at length, but the current moment in cultural theory and the politics of survival—which some theorists summarize as the age of the Anthropocene (Steffen, Crutzen, & McNeill, 2007; Smith & Zeder, 2013; Zylinska, 2014; Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016; Wark, 2016; Dellasala & Goldstein, 2017)—calls for an attempt to bring together the big questions that scholars are asking about media, waste, and consumption into an exploration of how waste is mediated, and to what extent those media narratives connect consumer culture with the environment and the sustainability of the human species.

This chapter provides a review of key literature dealing with garbage from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and makes the argument that there has been a lacuna in theorizing garbage from the cultural, media, and discursive perspectives. Although garbage dumps, recycling systems, and the various individuals and communities who live in and off them, have been studied in detail from sociological and anthropological perspectives, in media studies little has been written about representations of garbage, save the use of “trash” as a metaphorical category for analyzing issues of class, for example, in talk shows (Manga, 2003). Building on my previous work, which examined the mechanics of consumerist discourse (Iqani, 2012), and the complex meanings of consumption in the global south (Iqani, 2016), this book will continue to politicize consumption, in global and cultural context, by turning attention to what is left behind after consumption has taken place. In the context of rapidly dwindling natural resources and increasingly extreme attempts to extract the fossil fuels that remain in the earth and under the oceans, a global population that is projected to have grown by another two billion souls within the next twenty years, and the many, intensifying ways in which consumption is being centered in narratives of what development and the “good life” means, it is increasingly important to consider the “other” side of consumption: those material formations of waste, garbage, and trash that accrue once human actors have accessed, enjoyed, and disposed of the many commodities that they want and need in their lives.

Waste interjects not only into our material spaces and experiences, but also into our mediated lives and representational spaces. When we look around us, at the highly mediated cultures in which we exist, it may seem that narratives of production, wealth, commodities, and their consumption dominate popular culture narratives. But arguably, with an increase in environmental awareness, knowledge about climate change and the growth of what could be termed an apocalyptic mentality (often reflected in dramatic films, novels, and television shows imagining the world in some state of postcollapse), the materiality of trash is becoming less hidden and more visible. Admittedly, narratives about the waste created by consumer culture are not a particularly overriding theme in popular media. Our screens, retail spaces, and virtual experiences remain dominated by narratives of celebrity, sexiness, and a world of glossy artifacts calling out to us to own them and achieve happiness, no matter how fleeting. But still, through this clatter of consumerist discourse, constantly being shaped and reshaped by economic and political power, constantly being integrated and deployed in different ways in personal psychologies, lifestyles, and identity projects, we can easily find a number of narratives in which postconsumer trash takes the stage. It is these narratives—purposefully selected for analysis—that form the material explored in this work.

At the end of all commodities’ lives (and therefore consumption trajectory) are obsolescence, abandonment, and waste: the trash heap. It is arguably impossible to consider a culture of waste apart from a culture of materialism and consumption. To what extent do narratives about the material detritus of overconsumption fit into—and disrupt—glossy, hyperreal neoliberal discourses about consumer culture? Increasingly, through lifestyles centered around ethical consumption, popular critiques of hyperconsumption, and the rise of green consciousness (at least among the middle classes that most media forms serve), narratives about waste are coming into the public domain through various forms of representation, from fine art to popular culture. Waste enters the public imagination through a number of media forms and genres, often closely linked with particularly moralizing discussions about ethical consumption and the sustainability of the planet. What other narratives link waste and consumption? And, what else can be learned from looking at different ways in which garbage and waste are visualized and narrativized in popular media and culture?

Through the focus on the mediation of postconsumer trash, this book aims to explore pressing questions about the sustainability of consumer culture and by extension the entire system of global neoliberal capitalism. This takes place through the examination of three discrete, yet interrelated, thematic realms, each dealt with in a separate chapter. The first asks about the possibilities and limits of individual agency and action in relation to sustainable modes of consuming, producing, and working with waste. To what extent is the “problem” of trash something that can be solved by individual attitudes and deeds? How do these possibilities and limitations shift, depending on the geographical, class, and social context of agency and activism? These questions are explored through case studies relating to media narratives about recycling and waste reduction undertaken by diverse subjects in diverse locations. The second theme asks how the waste produced by luxurious consumption and hedonistic cultures is both talked about and denied in popular communication narratives. In what ways is waste talked about and represented in relation to pleasurable consumption? This question is explored through case studies linked to pleasure-seeking entertainment and music festivals as well as tropical island tourism, specifically Western media narratives about beach cleanups. The third theme aims to explore the media aesthetics of wide-scale environmental devastation, asking how complicity and hope are integrated into narratives about oil spills and plastic islands in the oceans, and how these are related to ideas about consumer accountability or recklessness. To what extent are optimistic and pessimistic attitudes, along with invitations for imagining responsibility, affect, and scale, integrated into media narratives about these planet-wide issues? And in turn, how is consumer culture included or excluded from this bigger picture?

Together, the focus on these three themes—individual agency and recycling, hedonistic consumption and its aftermath, and huge-scale devastation and the shadow of consumerism—allows for a new set of arguments about waste and its place in the popular imagination and the media matrix of consumer culture to emerge. In each thematic chapter, a number of different case studies are selected, dealing with media narratives and discourses linked to each theme, ranging from stories of agency in relation to recycling, different ways in which waste is aestheticized when it is used as a raw material for art making, how hedonistic practices of luxury island tourism and festival going are narrated in relation to waste, and how fossil fuel‒based forms of environmental devastation are visually narrated. These case studies are purposefully selected from a variety of global contexts, allowing the analysis to travel from New York City to Pune to Johannesburg, from the Tankwa Karoo in South Africa to tropical Indian Ocean islands to the pastoral hills of Glastonbury in England, and into unpeopled ocean-scapes littered with oil or plastic. What links these case studies is that they are in some way mediated (Silverstone, 2005; Chouliaraki, 2006a)—that is, brought into the public eye through technological forms of communication and mass dissemination—and that they in some way include garbage in their narratives. Through these case studies, this book offers a “tour” through some of the key ways in which garbage has been mediated in recent years.

At this point it is useful to address the methodological and analytical approach taken in the book. The work reported on here draws on media discourse analysis and an ethnographic sensibility in order to develop narratively grounded cultural theory. Rooted in a qualitative epistemology, and seeking to explore big conceptual questions, specific case studies of media representation were selected for analysis in each thematic chapter. These case studies were purposively chosen on the basis of their relevance to the themes of individual agency, hedonistic consumption, and the aesthetics of environmental catastrophe. The content of each case study—comprised of specific media texts drawn from specific publicly available media sources—was then interpreted using tools of visual, multimodal, narrative, and discourse analysis, and put into dialogue with one another. In general, it is worth noting that wherever possible, these analyses were socially contextualized, sometimes through my own lived experiences relevant to the particular case study (for example, in chapter 2, media texts about Afrika Burn and Glastonbury Festival are discussed, but I have attended both festivals and was therefore able to add a little observational detail to the analysis), but mostly by making links between the case study and the cultural politics of the society in which the case study is embedded. It is certainly not possible for qualitative analysis to be objective; arguably it is the very subjectivity of its approach, and its grounding in a reflexive sensibility, that brings much of its analytical power. Of course, it is inescapable that my own intellectual and social predilections will have had some influence over the analysis offered in these pages. Many of the case studies I encountered through my own lived experience, both social and intellectual, and indeed my choice to focus my academic efforts on understanding them represents an important opportunity for the theoretical and the personal to come together in a meaningful way. It is very difficult to write about consumption and waste without reflecting on what consumption and waste mean to one’s life, person, household, and community. Precisely because this book theorizes and politicizes the mediation of waste through an analytical framework tied to big philosophical questions about the role of consumer culture in human life, and the concomitant role of human consumption in the devastation of the planet, it requires a degree of personal involvement. In the same way that consumption is inherently tied to ideas of agency and individuality, so too is the waste produced by consumption. No theorist or author can be considered apart from the topics of which they write, especially those that are so closely tied to notions of the self and its place in the world. These big questions can be hard to hold, both in terms of the multiple theories and philosophical traditions that they call up and in terms of the deep emotional anxiety they inevitably touch (about the futures of the planet, the human race, other species, our own families and friends). Although I cannot claim to have fully resolved these theoretical complexities and anxieties, in this book I have explored them as thoroughly as I am able to, by bringing the methods of media discourse analysis into dialogue with auto-ethnographic and reflexive sensibilities. My intention was to write as critically and honestly as I could about what the stories of waste that we tell ourselves in turn can tell us about what consumption means to the self and to the environment and to the relationship between the two. The work presented here is therefore at once reflective, analytical, and exploratory, and it is aimed at opening up new avenues of theory and discussion about the links between consumption, waste, and the environment.

The rest of this chapter is devoted to constructing a theoretical framework that offers philosophical orientation points within which we can position ourselves intellectually and ethically in relation to garbage, in both media form and content. The discussion is also aimed at contextualizing the case studies and analyses that follow, and making a broader case for the importance of including questions of mediation in intellectual work aimed at making sense of this critical moment in which humankind finds itself: the Anthropocene.

There are many words that are used to describe the leftover matter that marks human life and activity. As such, it is necessary to consider the terms that will be used in this book. According to Rathje & Murphy (2001: 9), in the American context the words “garbage,” “trash,” “refuse,” and “rubbish” each have specific meanings, and are not interchangeable. In line with technical definitions used by municipal workers and council waste collection systems, trash is defined as dry waste (that is, any item that is inorganic, such as discarded packaging), while garbage refers to wet waste (that is, most often the remains of food as well as other kinds of organic detritus). Refuse refers to both wet and dry items (that is, a mix of trash and garbage), while rubbish refers to refuse that has been combined with construction debris. Although these precise terms are useful in a technical sense, they are most relevant to the bureaucratic systems designed to collect and dispose of various forms of domestic and industrial waste in urban environments. To the nonspecialist, the terms are likely used interchangeably in everyday talk. Users of American English are likely to prefer the terms garbage and trash, while users of British English are likely to prefer the term rubbish or refuse. Considered together, the “simplest definition of waste is discarded, expelled or excess matter,” and “while terms like ‘rubbish’ or ‘litter’ describe the random by-products of daily life, ‘waste’ invokes a much more complicated set of meanings” (Hawkins, 2006: vii). Waste is often used to gesture back to the excess matter produced by various industries, such as nuclear, medical, or construction waste, whereas litter is often characterized as the individualized dropping of excess matter in public space (rather than a dustbin). In this book, at times the specific meanings of each term as outlined above will be deployed in relation to discussions of specific case studies. But in more general theoretical observations and explorations, the terms rubbish, trash, and garbage will be used more or less interchangeably, to mean in the general sense the excess matter produced by various forms of human production and consumption. After all, the aim of this book is not to describe in detail the technical processes and bureaucratic vocabulary deployed by those whose task it is to dispose of waste, but to think through the broader cultural and consumerist implications of how narratives about waste enter the public realm through media, and what this in turn can tell us about the current moment in the human condition.

MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF GARBAGE

This book focuses exclusively on media representations of garbage. As such, it is necessary to clarify how media representation is defined and deployed, and why media images and narratives of garbage specifically matter. Much important work has already been done, bringing together the realms of media studies and environmental studies in different ways. Some take a focus on matters of political communication in relation to risk and environmental pollution (Hook et al., 2017), while others focus on the impact of the infrastructures of media technology on the environment (Cubitt, 2005; Gabrys, 2013; Rust, Monani & Cubitt, 2015; Starosielski & Walker, 2016). Other works explore the ways in which media texts and technologies impact on and intersect with environmental activism and communication (Pickerill, 2010; Graf, 2016; Newlands, 2018). Another important link between media studies and environmental studies is work that looks at greenwashing—when corporations seek to make their brands seem environmentally friendly or aligned to sustainable values (often without a direct link to their actual practices and actions on the ground) (Greer & Bruno, 1998; Pearse, 2012; Bowen, 2014). Some companies use “tokenistic” eco-projects to improve their image to environmentally conscious consumers, and these corporate branding efforts need to be firmly theorized as a media practice. Furthermore, it is arguably important to consider practices of “greenwashing” and corporate social responsibility as linked to longer histories of paternalistic philanthropy and patterns of public relations strategies aimed at benefiting the bottom line (Littler, 2008: 57‒60). As Jussi Parikki writes, media technologies themselves have a “geology,” that is, were partly made from compounds extracted from the earth (Parikka, 2015), and leave behind on and in the earth very material, often toxic, remnants (Jucan, Parikka, & Schneider, 2019). It also worth noting that the term media environment is often deployed to mean the totality of mediated texts, technologies, and interfaces that surround individuals in their everyday lives, particularly in the digital age (Press & Williams, 2010). Of course, this specific correlation between the terms media and environment is not the one intended to be explored in this book, though an argument could be made that it is precisely in the all-encompassing media environment that representation about the environment can be said to matter more than ever.

This book concerns itself with representations of rubbish rather than actual garbage. It has been observed that “it would be a blessing if it were possible to study garbage in the abstract, to study garbage without having to handle it physically” (Rathje & Murphy, 2001: 9). This wistful observation comes from the leaders of a long-term research project based at the University of Arizona, in which they studied, quite literally, trash. The researchers systematically collected a wide variety of household rubbish and industry waste from the landfill, and took it to a specialized research site at the university in order to carefully comb through it to learn more about domestic habits, patterns of consumption and disposal, and what those things in turn said about the condition of humanity in the United States. The physical waste produced by human activities is very repellent: it is comprised of decomposing and rotting materials. Every manner of waste produced by us combines, over time, into one quite abhorrent materiality in the garbage dump. There, things decay over time: foodstuffs rot and give off foul odors, attracting rats, flies, and other vermin; metals rust and become toxic; papers and cards become soggy and disintegrate; and other materials, such as plastic, change shape and become dull and broken (although not breaking down into constituent matter for many hundreds of years). The approach taken by the Garbage Project was to look at, touch, smell, sort through the garbage that they collected, and to try to return the otherwise assimilated state of the garbage into clear typologies and categories in such a way that light could be shed on the scope of Ameri...