Plastic Bags Living With Rubish PDF

International Journal of Cultural
Studies
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Plastic bags: Living with rubbish

Gay Hawkins
International Journal of Cultural Studies 2001; 4; 5
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01hawkins(ds) 26/1/01 9:12 am Page 5
ARTICLE
INTERNATIONAL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications

London, Thousand Oaks,
CA and New Delhi
Volume 4(1): 523
[1367-8779(200103)4:1; 523; 016184]
Plastic bags
Living with rubbish
Gay Hawkins
University of New South Wales, Australia
ABSTRACT This article reflects on the meanings of waste in our everyday
lives. It argues that a changing relation to waste is a changing relation to self. It

traces shifting rubbish discourses and practices, looking particularly at how waste
has become morally problematized: at how 'disposal' has become 'management'.
Its aim is to examine how a new ethos of waste might be created beyond
environmental moralism. For the problem with moral codes and rulings is that
they often deny the complexities, paradoxes and visceral registers that mark our
relations with rubbish. Using Deleuze and Foucault, an alternative ethics of waste
is proposed, one that foregrounds relationality and the arts of transience rather
than separation and mastery. For, to be open to waste, to be mindful and careful
with it, is to be open to our own becomings.
KEYWORDS becoming conscience disposal environmentalism

ethics management problematization
There was a scene in American Beauty that prompted a wholly unexpected

sadness. Ill call it the rubbish scene: an extended video image of a plastic
shopping bag blowing around in a strong wind. Everyone I have spoken to
about this film remembers this scene but they generally dont describe it as
sad: beautiful, yes; moving and profound, no. Yet, for me, this scene was
haunted. As alive as the bag was, as lyrical as its dance with the wind was,
it was still a plastic bag. It could not entirely escape its materiality or its

6 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)
semiotics. The bag seemed to carry the whole enormous weight of ecologi-
cal crisis. The lightness of the bag, the emptiness of the bag, was in contrast
with its burden as the penultimate sign of environmental catastrophe: a
world drowning in plastic bags. A world in which we are constantly
instructed to say no to plastic bags!. The aesthetic resonances, the chore-
ography, the animation, could not completely override the moral under-
tones. The bag was rendered beautiful, but this didnt make it good.
I have no doubt that my response was partially an effect of being rendered
environmentally aware; all those years of public campaigns instructing me
to resist the easy convenience of plastic bags, to do my bit for nature. This
training does not mean that I have eliminated plastic bags from my life, far
from it, but it has meant that my relations with them have become more
complicated. Perhaps this is why the redemptive gesture that structures the
rubbish scene was so troubling. For redemption here meant the absolutely
worthless and trivial transformed into the absolutely beautiful; redemption
without any concern for moral or ecological consequences. I am simply too
ambivalent about plastic bags for this transformation to be completely suc-
cessful. For me, the bag signified much more than the beauty of ephemera;
it signified a major environmental problem rendered sensuous and en-
chanted. This scene invited me to change my affective relations with plastic
bags, to delight in something I have been trained to hate. I think this could
be why I found it so deeply unsettling. I think this could be why I felt sym-
pathy for the bag.
Consider another image of plastic bags, this time a television commercial
made by the New South Wales Environmental Protection Authority (EPA).
Here we see a man washing his car on the street without any concern for
the litres of soapy water draining into the stormwater system. The next scene
cuts to the interior of the drain where the soapy water gushes on its way,
accompanied by street detritus. The final scene returns to the car washer no
longer cleaning the car but at leisure, swimming in a pristine river sur-
rounded by bush, an image of Eden. He dives underwater and surfaces with
a plastic bag clinging to his shoulder. With a shudder of aversion he flicks
it off. Trust a plastic bag to spoil everything!
Unlike American Beauty, the EPA allows for no ambiguity about the
status of the bag. It is unequivocally bad. It is matter out of place, contami-
nating the purity of the natural with its sticky persistence. There is only one
response to this bag, disgust. The bag disrupts the binary between pure and
contaminated and in the same moment reminds us that binaries are more
often than not unequal relations. For, in this ad, contamination is not simply
puritys other, it is the lesser and devalued term in a moral framework.
Feeling sympathy for the plastic bag, feeling disgust for the plastic bag;
such different experiences of the bag, such different problematizations of
our relations with them. The wave of sadness inextricably draws me to the
bag what is this sense of connection, grief? The shudder of aversion is a

Hawkins Living with rubbish 7
gesture of desperate separation that is never completely successful. Its too

late: nature has been contaminated, disgust is unable to purify. Despite the
differences in these visceral intensities, both remind us that we cannot avoid
relating to rubbish: connected, separate, either way were implicated. What
is the nature of these implications? What ethical principles do they enable?
What selves do they produce?
In American Beauty the bag is aestheticized and we are invited to see it
as beautiful and enchanted. In the EPA commercial the bag is an object of
moral condemnation, an object that provokes judgement and guilt. Its not
often that we experience rubbish as beautiful, and I am sure some would
find this aestheticization of a major environmental problem grotesque. Yet,
in this cinematic moment, the deliberative and prescriptive logic of the EPAs
moral interdictions are profoundly disturbed. The American Beauty scene
alludes to different ways of living with bags to our various uses and experi-
ences of them. It locates plastic bags in the realm of the sensual and the
affective and it refuses the essentializing move in much moral judgement that
renders rubbish always already bad, thereby denying paradox and ambigu-
ity, let alone recognition of our shifting relational sensibilities with it.
Apart from startling me with its lyricism, what the scene in American
Beauty did was remind me of the complex social life of bags. For much of
their biography bags are very useful. They help us get the shopping home
and then they store the rubbish that lots of the shopping becomes, theyre
great for putting wet swimmers in after PE at school, they are excellent for
dust proofing. Often I feel gratitude for the humble practicality of a plastic
bag: here, put it in a plastic bag. My point is not to defend plastic bags, to
make a plea for a much-maligned object. Rather, I wish to acknowledge the
variety of relations we have with them in order to show that their status as
rubbish is not fixed. That may be one of their identities but its not the only
one. It is this very ambiguity and complexity of uses that complicates moral
rulings and condemnations about bags as bad, and that signals the differ-
ence between morality as a set of commands and doctrines and ethics as a
set of practical tactics and cultivations that afford opportunities for reflec-
tive modification of the self. In our everyday life with plastic bags their
movement through different categories, from container to rubbish, gener-
ates different attitudes and modes of relating. This is the stuff of ethics not
objects or practices classified as good or bad, but relations of thinking,
feeling, acting, becoming.
My paradoxical reaction to these two images of plastic bags is the
impetus for this article. How is it that a scene from a hit movie has more
emotional and political impact on me than the EPAs waste education cam-
paign? Why is it that the EPA commercial leaves me feeling guilty and
patronized, irritated by its explicit pedagogical intent? Could it possibly be
more environmentally friendly to feel sympathy and ethical concern for
rubbish rather than shame, disgust and anxiety about it? How can these

Figure 1
Mutawintji National
Park, outback
Australia.
Photo: Warwick
Pearse.
reactions and questions help develop an understanding of the ethics of

waste, of the place of rubbish in our ethical lives? Is it possible to develop
a different ethos of engagement with rubbish?
My intention is to open up other ways of thinking about the social regu-
lation of our relations with waste beyond command moralities: dont litter,
refuse plastic bags, reuse and recycle. For, as much as we may agree with
such interdictions and recognize their rationality and correctness, cultivat-
ing such practices in our daily lives involves complex relations with both
waste and our multilayered subjectivity. And it is this very complexity that
leads us into the terrain described by William Connolly as that tropical
undergrowth of life flourishing beneath the brittle trees of grand moral
theory (1999: 17). Here we confront not only the ubiquity of ethical work,
but also its imbrication with the corporeal, its fundamental engagement
with the visceral registers of being (Connolly, 1999: 3).
Problematizing disposal
We need to get rid of things. Waste is something we all have to manage.

Beyond biological necessity, we expel and discard in the interests of order-
ing the self, in the interests of maintaining a boundary between what is con-
nected to the self and what isnt.1 Waste management in all its various
forms and historical mutations is fundamental to the practice of subjectiv-
ity. It is bound up with a whole host of practices through which we culti-
vate particular sensibilities and sensual relations with the world. Styles of
garbage elimination, then, can be located within Foucaults (1990) arts of
existence: all those actions and rules of conduct through which we trans-
form ourselves and our lives according to particular aesthetic and ethical
criteria. And, as Foucault has shown, problematization is fundamental to
these arts. Not only does it render being available to calculation and query,

it also identifies the practices and habits through which measures of good-
ness and order are established.
If styles of garbage elimination are also, implicitly, styles of self, how have
techniques of disposal been problematized? And how do these problemati-
zations shape our rubbish relations? To consider these questions we need to
examine the ethos of disposability; we need to think about those objects
marketed on the basis of their disposability. And were talking about more
than nappies, plastic bags or polystyrene cups here; were talking about the
fundamental logic of the commodity form, seriality. Mass production of
objects and their consumption depends on widespread acceptance of, even
pleasure in, exchangeability; replacing the old, the broken, the out of
fashion with the new. The capacity for serial replacement is also the capac-
ity to throw away without concern. Although ignorance of rubbish and dis-
tance from its management used to be a mark of distinction, the growth of
mass consumption and governmental systems of waste removal after the
Second World War allowed this level of disregard for where things ended
up to be extended across populations.2
In her history of rubbish, Waste and Want (1999), Susan Strasser chal-
lenges the assumption that the ethos of disposability is simply emblematic
of 1950s consumerism (1999: 266). For her, efficiency, cleanliness and
replaceability have been a significant part of modernist culture since the days
of paper collars in the 1860s. Post-Second World War expansions in manu-
facturing and consumerism merely enhanced already existing relations to
some objects in which the desire for possession or convenience subsumed
any concern for what became of things once they were used up or classified
as no longer of value. However, although disposal may be the ultimate
destiny of objects valued for their convenience or for their commodity
status, the logic of this disposability is a product of different processes of
value formation and decline. The object marketed for its convenience evokes
a modernist asceticism and temporality in which the technical is valorized
for not only saving time, but also for its instrumental rationality.3 Many
convenient objects have a presence as imminent rubbish that is difficult to
suppress. Plastic, paper and polystyrene discourage sensual attachments
their use in the making of transient objects signifies a finite value, a value
waiting to be used up.
Commodities, on the other hand, may well be convenient and efficient but
they are also much more. Their fetish qualities conceal the socially con-
structed nature of their value and animate them with autonomy and magic.
Because we have no idea how commodities come into being, their life after
weve finished with them is also of little or no interest. The magical quali-
ties of the commodity can obliterate their origins and their final destination.
Often this destination may not be the tip things can move out of com-
modity status without becoming rubbish. They might begin a life of lonely
isolation in the shed or be born again into the gift economy of the charity

shop. Chucking away is only one option but it is an option made easier by
the logic of seriality: just get another one.
Convenience and commodification reconstitute subject/object relations in
ways that make the capacity to dispose without concern possible. And
Strasser is right in arguing that this relation had to be acquired. But she is
somewhat glib in reading this acquisition as symptomatic of a way of life
remote from hand production (1999: 265). For the kind of self imagined
in this rubbish practice is not simply alienated from production, it is a self
who regards rubbish as ethically insignificant, a self for whom waste has
few moral connotations. A self who locates decisions about cleanliness and
purity in the intimate gesture of discarding rather than in the social life of
rubbish, the destination of the discarded.
This doesnt mean that disposability isnt problematized; rather, that the
terms of this problematization do not involve reflective modification of
the self. Disposability constitutes waste as a technical problem, something
to be administered by the most efficient and rational technologies of
removal. Generally this means dumping; the bin, the local tip and the
drain have become emblematic sites for the disposal of anything and
everything; these are the homes of waste. Yet, as anyone who has stood
at the edge of a tip or stared down a drain and felt the wave of horror and
fascination would know, this ethos of disposability is a technical and
spatial fantasy. Our relations with waste cannot be so easily severed; out
of sight does not necessarily mean out of mind. Disposability represents
our waste relations as necessary elimination, an inevitable part of progress
and consumption. This is a relation of mastery that constitutes the self
that discards as whole, separate, untouched, purified. And in this relation
the moral implications of our complex and shifting connections with
rubbish are denied.
Its harder to sell disposability now, perhaps because weve all seen too
much rubbish. Waste has become visible, a landscape in its own right. This
doesnt mean that disposing isnt flourishing; rather, that a different prob-
lematization of waste has emerged over the past 30 years that has made
trouble for the idea of careless separation the technical has become impli-
cated in the moral. This problematization has depended on different invo-
cations of contamination and their implications for the social body. Waste
was exceeding its limits, it was no longer contained in appropriate places
but was everywhere; classificatory boundaries were collapsing. The con-
dition of the environment was threatened by the presence of rubbish, so
too was urban order. The rise of anti-litter campaigns in the late 1960s rep-
resented rubbish as not merely matter out of place but as morally unset-
tling, evidence of the collapse of civic obligation.4 More crucial, however,
was the way these campaigns linked the individual body to the social body.
A favoured image in anti-litter campaigns was (and still is) the disembod-
ied hand in the act of dropping rubbish. This gesture of separation was no

longer a sign of individual purification but of pollution, evidence of an

undisciplined self unable to regulate its actions in the interests of social and
environmental order. Thoughtless disposal was given moral content it
was now implicated in, even responsible for, environmental and social
decline.
Waste is now something to be managed. Disposal has become implicated
in a morality less concerned with maintaining the purity of the subject and
more concerned with protecting the purity of the environment and estab-
lishing the virtue of the careful waste manager. To manage waste has
meant a reorganization of our relations with rubbish and self. Witness, for
example, the phenomenal transformations in domestic waste practices
evident in the normalization of recycling, in the instilling of a collective
sense of individual responsibility for sorting our rubbish. In constituting
waste as a domain of moral concern, as a field of personal responsibility
and careful domestic disciplines, we can see how historical and personal
conducts around disposing have been subjected to questioning, how they
have been made the target of moral reflection. And it is in the space of the
home, in the field of domestic waste education and the massive range of
campaigns geared at transforming populations relations with waste, trans-
forming disposability into management, that we can see how everyday rou-
tines and habits are implicated in particular sorts of subjectivity. In
managing our domestic waste according to new principles of self-scrutiny
we are making the self an object of reflection in and through our relations
with waste.
Waste is now a field of activity structured by legislated and normative
moralities, by disciplinary codes that order conduct in the interests of wider
objectives: from reduction of landfill to global ecological survival. It is a
domain in which we have come to experience a sense of duty and responsi-
bility for protecting the purity and otherness of the environment. The emer-
gence of a waste management discourse shows how moral problematization
has functioned to justify a range of interdictions and self-disciplines, a
change in how we dispose of things. This is a technology of governing, a
way of guiding conduct where we can see the links between the broader
political rationalities of waste policy and the micro-technologies of daily life;
where we can see how permeable the boundaries are between the domestic,
the voluntary, the governmental (Poovey, 1995: 12).
But does moral problematization always demand interdictions and pro-
hibitions? What is the relation of ethics to these legislated and normative
moralities? Are ethics merely practical reason, the product of autonomous
rational will in the service of moral codes? Or are they more about diverse
techniques and micropolitics of the self? How does waste reveal the relations
between the moral governance of behaviour and the arts of the self? How
are governmental problematics about the administration of waste enfolded
with our own idiosyncratic rubbish arts?

Putting out the garbage
Putting out the garbage has become complicated. No longer the lugging of
the bin to the kerb a couple of times a week, now its a complex assemblage
of actions: collecting all the papers and cardboard (clean only) and putting
them in their special container; rinsing the bottles and tins, removing labels
and lids and allocating them to their container; putting the food scraps in
the compost or worm farm (no meat); wheeling out the bin for everything
else. Dealing with our rubbish is an endless cycle of ritual and repetition,
now dominated by time-consuming acts of classification and sorting.
These new garbage practices have been overlaid on the old. Waste
involves ritual performance of an assemblage of actions and beliefs funda-
mental to the constitution of habitus. It has always been one of the ways we
keep chaos at bay, order the self, rehearse death. Now, in managing it, we
are also assuaging our guilt about the planet, being virtuous for the neigh-
bours and engaging in a form of disciplinary individualism that is both
voluntary and coercive at the same time (Cruikshank, 1999: 3). These newer
meanings and the practices theyve produced signal the impacts of domes-
tic waste education and the ways these are enfolded within a new conscience
about rubbish. And it is this conscience that is a significant element of our
moral attachment to recycling. Hundreds of surveys examining attitudes to
recycling reveal that peoples commitment to it is based on a strong sense of
doing something for the environment. This willingness to recycle, to vol-
untarily change rubbish practices and make the self environmentally
aware, reveals the play of power in subjectivity. There is no question that
the demand to recycle and minimize waste has come from state programmes
and structural transformations in domestic waste services that are coercive,
but the success of these changes, in terms of widespread participation across
populations, has depended on changes in micro-levels of everyday life, on
the ways weve willingly acted on ourselves. This alignment of subjectivity
with subjection is governance. But what is so significant about rubbish prac-
tices is that most of us are doing it for nature not for the NSW Waste Service
or the local council. We participate because we believe in some abstracted
sense of social and environmental good. We experience recycling and com-
posting as autonomous gestures, as expressions of our environmentally con-
cerned subjectivity.5
What, then, is the logic of waste education; how is it implicated in the
idea of conscience and new forms of subjectivity? Consider the recent leaflet
from the NSW Waste Service addressed to the householder: Are You a Good
Sort? (nd). The pun on good sort reveals how much our relations with
waste have become reordered around a variety of new classificatory pro-
cedures, the assemblage of actions these demand (bottles here, papers there),
and the virtue that is attached to these. We can see here how abstract notions
of care and management of the planet are linked to micro-practices in the

home, to instructions on how we should be around our rubbish; much more

attentive, much more dutiful, much more careful than the culture of dis-
posability as careless disregard ever demanded. Sorting waste means regu-
lating and disciplining our practices in order to render the self more
congruent with particular values: restraint our beautiful city is running
out of landfill areas so its up to all of us to do our bit to help reduce the
amount of garbage we throw out; responsibility when shopping, take
your own shopping bag. Look for products in packs that can be refilled or
recycled, and buy products made from recycled materials; economy all
our waste management centers take recyclable materials for free so save
yourself and your community a load of cash (Are You a Good Sort?,
leaflet, NSW Waste Service, nd).
The macropolitical demand of waste policy, Lets reduce waste, is suc-
cessful only when, borrowing from Connolly, micropolitical receptivity to
it has been nurtured across several registers and constituencies (1999: 149).
But exactly which registers of being are addressed in the Good Sort cam-
paign and which are ignored or denied? In the appeal to restraint, responsi-
bility and economy, moral reason and judgement are privileged. The play of
guilt and obligation are an ever-present subtext as we are extolled to do our
bit. This is moral compunction. Obedience to the regimes of recycling
depends on a monitoring and disciplining relation to the self and this
relation is successful because it mobilizes conscience, because the rituals and
habits of waste management are implicated in reflexive techniques of the
self.
Conscience is a potent reminder of how we make the self into an object
of ethical attention, how we problematize and modify our conduct on the
basis of ethical principles we aspire to. This particular relation to the self
has a history. As Foucault has shown, conscience is a product of a range of
techniques of the self that have come to constitute certain forms of person-
hood. To be a person now means cultivating particular modes of reflexivity.
It means developing special ethical techniques and capacities, or what
Mauss refers to as techniques of conscience (cited in Hunter, 1993: 128).
These techniques and capacities are historically variable in their form and
targets. Their presence is not evidence of a foundational interiority ground-
ing the subject, rather of shifting modes of living and self-cultivation.
Human abilities can be ordered and understood without recourse to intro-
spective moral problematization (Hunter, 1993: 128).
Post-Foucauldian genealogies of subjectivity reject metapsychology and
its presumption of fundamental laws of interiority. Interiority is not a
psychological system nor is it the core of being. It is, to use Deleuzes (1995)
term, a historically contingent discontinuous surface. In the final two
volumes of The History of Sexuality Foucault subjected interiority to radical
critique. He pursued the questions of how the relation to oneself and others
constituted subjectivity and how principles of internal regulation change. A

central concern was what happened when formerly esoteric ethical and
spiritual practices were taken up by large-scale institutions such as the
church and then bureaucratic states. This is the terrain of the govern-
mentsubjectivity relation where relations to oneself become implicated in
agencies of power-knowledge; when, according to Deleuze, the individual
is coded or recoded within a moral knowledge, and above all he becomes
the stake in a power struggle (Deleuze, 1995: 103). This is the point when
subjectivation becomes subjection, when power in the form of control and
dependence becomes implicated in daily life and interiority, when subjects
become tied to an identity by conscience and other techniques of moral self
knowledge (Deleuze, 1995).6
The Good Sort campaign shows how processes of self-regulation and con-
science shape our relations with waste, how circuits of guilt, self-reproach
and virtue have become enfolded within our intimate acts of disposing. The
problem is that this rubbish relation denies other ways of being with waste.
Waste habits are represented as flat, static, mechanical, easily altered with
appeals to reason and good sense. There is no room for disgust or horror
or pleasure or resentment, no room for movement between different regis-
ters of subjectivity, no room for any recognition of how changes in practices
of the self may affect ethical sensibilities. This type of moral instruction fore-
closes any possibility of understanding shifting forms of being in our
relations with waste. Relation means mastery and control we may be being
more careful and attentive with our waste but it is still absolutely and
unquestionably separate from the self, something to be got rid of. Recycling,
then, could be described as virtue added disposal. Although it infuses new
rubbish techniques with righteousness; although it qualifies the loss of
chucking away with a sense that this rubbish is entering a liminal zone
between waste and new commodity, its still disposal. Its disposal in which
the self is morally purified, disposal as an act of redemption.
What remains unacknowledged in the Good Sort campaign are the impli-
cations such practices may have for our ethical and affective sensibilities
around waste. Yet in the demand to handle and sort our waste responsibly
and to make aspects of it visible on the street, prior and entrenched senses
of order and self-cultivation may well be unsettled. A letter to the editor
protesting about recycling captures this tension beautifully:
While in favour of recycling, the new, excessively complicated arrangements

fail to cater to the needs of households in the following ways. The provision
of four garbage receptacles is an eyesore and results in problems of storing
these receptacles close to the street as well as out of direct vision. They are a
major cause of visual pollution and convey a Third World appearance with
garbage bins lining our streets. . . . These decisions are not in ratepayers
interests, despite the noble ideals which were possibly behind them. (North
Shore Times, 16 October 1998: 9)

There is no doubt that this writer hates recycling; stuff noble ideals, its
messy, offensive and primitive. Beyond irritation there is the sense in which
the disciplines of recycling contest the stability of the self. They make trouble
for existing forms of self-artistry and cultivation not simply through the
privileging of a third world aesthetic, but also through the affront to deeper
and more visceral registers of being. The letter goes on to describe the sense
of loathing and disgust experienced when rubbish sticks to the bottom of
the bin as a result of constant compaction by householders desperate to
make all their waste fit in the new half-size containers. Then there are the
effects of dogs and wind disturbing overfull bins. Being aware of the moral
pressure to recycle does nothing to lessen the horror of it all because, for
this writer, judgement is a product of much more than rational argument.
Unlike the Good Sort campaign, this letter gets to the heart of wastes rela-
tionality. Having to manage waste under this new regime disturbs identity.
If waste is our most immediate other and establishing our difference and
separation from it is the condition of possibility for a self, then its persis-
tence, its refusal to go, its visibility, is a primordial threat to the drive for
wholeness. The self exists only in relation but rubbish practices based on
expulsion, disposal and elimination maintain the fantasy of separation and
sovereignty. Recycling disrupts this. Not only do we have to handle our
waste much more but it sticks around longer and aspects of it become
public. The implications of this for this letter writer are more than guilt and
resentment about an imposed moral duty they are about the ethical effects
of recycling practices on sensibilities, they are about the unsettling impacts
of recycling on the micropolitics of the self, they are about encounters he
doesnt want to have.
The implied references to aesthetics, abjection and the visceral in this
response to recycling reveal the heterodox nature of ethics and their relative
autonomy. This letter describes an experience of ethical discontent that
emerges from a waste ethos constituted around aesthetic rather than
environmental values. For this author the disciplines that recycling demands
harbour no opportunities for artistic practice,7 in fact they disrupt the
relation between order and beauty, aesthetics and ethics that are funda-
mental to his arts of existence. He can feel the pull of moral reason, he has
a conscience about waste but he also has sensibilities, disciplined forms of
sensuousness, that are seriously offended by these practices. He isnt mourn-
ing the planet, hes mourning the pleasures of disposal free of governmental
and moral restraints.
Ethics and the politics of becoming
If we accept that disposal is necessary, how could it be recast in ways that

acknowledge the ethical significance of rubbish without generating moral

righteousness or resentment? Domestic waste education seeks to order

bodies and affects around waste in certain ways but this plane of molar
political organization, as Deleuze calls it, exists in a relationship of tension
and negotiation with other planes and dimensions of being. Deleuzes insist-
ence on the plurivocity of being, on the multiplicity of dimensions, lines,
directions, signals how movements of becoming and immanence fragment
the normative work of the plane of organization. It also signals an ethics
that has little to do with rule-bound moralities.
In his readings of Foucault and Spinoza, Deleuze is concerned with forms
of being that exist beyond or in the interstices of guilt and conscience. In
seeking to restore ethics to explorations of ways of living and the molecular
in-between of subjects he privileges ethical practices that depend less on
external authority such as state disciplines and prescriptive moral codes and
more on cultivations and sensibilities. Deleuzes metaphor of the fold is
central to this ethics. The fold presumes not simply a self in relation, but
also a self without any essential interiority. The inside is an enfolding of the
outside, folds incorporate without totalizing, internalize without unifying,
they make spaces, surfaces, flows, layers. Subjectivation is created by
folding, by bending the outside through practical exercises (Deleuze, 1995:
104). And, Deleuze argues, even though Christian technologies of the self
may have transformed the person into a site of subjection, subjectivation
persists in those spaces and folds where the relation to oneself resists being
codified by agencies of power-knowledge: the relation to oneself is con-
tinually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise (1995: 104). Deleuzes use of
resistance does not imply some essence of the self called agency or whatever,
rather, it signals sensibilities and intensities moving below and within those
folds of the self implicated in modes of obligation and duty to various forms
of authority.
Deleuzes account of enfolding has been taken up by theorists of gov-
ernmentality.8 In seeking to understand the relation between the forms of
truth in which being is problematized and the habits and practices through
which we shape our own and others conduct, this work effectively decen-
tres notions of conscience, rule and authority. It allows us to see how
governing in all its permutations and variations is doubled, or implicated
in modes of ethical reflection and practice. Yet, as useful as this work is for
thinking about rule as a form of enfolding, it seems to involve a very partial
and particular reading of Deleuze. Studies of government allow us to see
how conscience is a mode of obligation to rules and norms, how the fold
of the relation between forces according to a particular rule (Deleuze,
1995: 104) constitutes us as governable subjects. What these studies are
less able to see are those forces of ethical life and being, those encounters,
visceral movements, differences that initiate other possibilities for subjec-
tivity and intersubjectivity what Connolly (1999) calls the movements of
becoming.

So it is to Connollys rich and suggestive dialogue with Deleuze and

Nietzsche, particularly in Chapter 3 of Why I Am Not a Secularist, that I
want to turn in order to see how new ethical possibilities around waste
might be initiated. For Connollys question, unlike the governmentality
theorists, is not how are codes of morality and normativity enfolded within
particular habits of being; rather, how can new identities and ethical attach-
ments emerge out of the unexpected energies and disturbances that unsettle
being? How does being operate in a paradoxical relation of tension and
interdependence with the movements of becoming (1999: 195)? In Con-
nollys argument conscience and other code-driven moral techniques are
crude and blunt tools for coping with the world. Their tendency to ground
moral actions in law, god, global survival, consensus or any other categori-
cal imperative makes them blind to the ambiguous, disturbing, contradic-
tory aspects of most ethical encounters. The moral weight of codes and
doctrines turns obligation into duty, guilt and resentment: I should do this
. . . because the environment is suffering, because I am law abiding, because
I am virtuous. This is obligation working in the interests of mastery and
self-certainty, obligation that undermines senses of ethical connection, impli-
cation, becoming, in order to maintain separation and the stability of being.
This is obligation as a moral technique that suppresses the visceral, the gut-
tural, the situational.
Yet, in the new experiences of obligation to our rubbish that recycling and
composting have initiated, the visceral and the guttural are ever-present, pal-
pable. We may act out of concern for the suffering of the environment, out
of duty and guilt, but we are also touching and sorting that which has lost
value, is rotting, is in a state of irretrievable decay. We see the end of mastery,
we see becoming (Connolly, 1999: 49). And our responses are shifting and
surprising. The compost bin becomes a site of beauty and fecundity all
those worms, all that soil in the making. The spilt rubbish spread over the
verge after pick-up gives you a shudder of aversion way beyond mere irri-
tation. Why is that such a disturbing sight? These moments of intensity,
excess, affect, surprise and unsettle they reveal a responsiveness to waste
circulating through every dutiful and correct practice. And it is in these
moments of responsiveness, these currents of movement and difference
within the self, in the selfs relation to otherness, that Connolly locates the
politics of becoming.
Responsiveness resonates with Deleuzes idea of the body as a plane of
affects: Affects are becomings. . . . We know nothing about a body until we
know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can enter
into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body (Delueze
and Guattari 1988: 2567). For Connolly, responsiveness is a condition of
possibility, it opens up lines of mobility and difference within the self, it is
something to be cultivated. An ethos of critical responsiveness (Connolly,
1999: 62) connects becoming to various practices of self-modification; it

involves work on the self in the interests of recognizing the plurivocity of being
and denaturalizing identity as stasis or essence:
The constitutive uncertainty at the center of becoming does not defeat the
central point. It, rather, reminds us how ethical uncertainty haunts the poli-
tics of becoming and how important it is to those who care for the plurivoc-
ity of being . . . to cultivate an ethos of critical responsiveness irreducible to
a fixed moral code or abstract conception of the person. (Connolly, 1999: 69)
What would an ethos of critical responsiveness look like in relation to
rubbish? Has it not already begun with the new waste regimes that we now
practise? Yes and no. The moral problematization of waste has established
new relations of obligation and duty with our rubbish, has initiated differ-
ent responses to it, but these still generally appeal to categorical moral
imperatives: global ecological survival, the care of the planet. The regulatory
disciplines involved often sit uneasily with other sensibilities and micro-
politics of the self, as the letter on hating recycling showed. In other words,
domestic waste education privileges a fairly restricted set of responses and
these are inextricably linked to the constraints of moral codes that too easily
slide into moralism. Guilt, resentment and anxiety are not politically pro-
ductive. Sure they may have mobilized most people to recycle, they may
underpin many peoples moral attachment to recycling, but they inhibit
other possibilities, other ways of being with waste, other responses. A poli-
tics of becoming does not proceed from guilt. It proceeds from a critical
responsiveness, critical in the sense that those intensities and affects in the
interstices of guilt and conscience awaken us to our own becoming.
So much waste education denies the tension between being and becom-
ing. It secures an obligation to new techniques and habits by insisting that
the threat of waste be mastered: reduced, reused, recycled. This fantasy of
control establishes the responsible self as stable, separate, whole. It main-
tains an absolute alterity of waste and blinds us to an awareness of how our
relations with it are fundamental to the very possibility of life. Mastery
inhibits the possibility of seeing in waste our own unremitting unbecoming.
But it is never complete or successful, as those responses of unease or pleas-
ure or grief reveal. And surely it is here with these openings and intensities
that different ethical relations with waste could be established, that obli-
gation could become gratitude.
I can think of only a few waste education campaigns that presume a
pleasure and generosity in waste celebrations of composting and a
campaign run by Brisbane City Council called Enjoy Your Garbage. In
composting campaigns organic waste is often represented as beautiful, its
formless disorder reconstituted as an aesthetic of abundance; scraps, dis-
cards, leftovers becoming soil. Then there are slogans like: What you dont
eat your garden will. The play here is on sameness, on the similarities
between self and garden, on exchanges that connect. Composting is framed

as a gift, in cultivating a sensibility for it we are cultivating a waste ethos

that proceeds from generosity rather than guilt.
As we know, composting and worm farms involve a quite different set of
waste relations from putting out the garbage or recycling. For a start we are
dealing with putrescible waste, things that rot and decompose, and we
generally dont throw this away, we manage it at home, carefully. And it is
precisely this process of care that allows us to see not only the relation
between destruction and conservation but also how we might engage ethi-
cally with loss and transience (Phillips, 1999).
In his reading of Darwins theories of earthworms, Adam Phillips finds an
account of an exemplary moral universe. Phillips argues that Darwin found
worms, for so long considered the bottom of the hierarchy, to be sophisti-
cated and heroic labourers. Their constant work digesting shows us another
sort of loss, a loss that is not destructive but transformative, a loss that is
also at the same time renewal. In praising the inexhaustible work that makes
the earth fertile Darwin celebrated the resilience and inventiveness of nature,
he replaced a Christian creation myth with a secular maintenance myth
(Phillips, 1999: 56). What Darwin finds in worms, according to Phillips, is
a moral universe predicated on collaborative generosity. Worms digestion
is not a form of altruism, it is gratuitously virtuous and it shows us the para-
doxical interconnections between destruction and renewal. Composting and
worm farms, then, can be considered as waste practices attentive to the arts
of transience rather than disposal. They afford ways of managing loss that
involve not destruction, but restoration, care, mindfulness and generosity.
The Enjoy Your Garbage campaign was more ambiguous. It involved
putting that slogan on garbage trucks, all education materials to households
and a series of radio ads with that punchline. But behind all this was a pretty
standard set of prescriptions about reducing, recycling, composting. Enjoy-
ment was to be found in doing the right thing, in self-discipline. Still, there
is something unsettling and suggestive about the interdiction to enjoy. Is this
the pleasure of control or of care and deliberation? Who can say, but at least
enjoyment cultivates other responses and ways of being with waste beyond
moral duty.
What this campaign does invoke is Italo Calvinos (1993) beautiful essay
on putting out the garbage, La Poubelle Agree, in which pleasure and
enjoyment, not duty or disgust, are the central emotions. This essay is a
series of reveries on rubbish rituals. Like so much waste education, Calvino
is concerned with practices, with our everyday behaviours around rubbish:
Here I am, then, on my way downstairs already, holding the bucket by its
semicircular handle, taking care it doesnt swing too much and spill its con-
tents. The lid I usually leave behind in the kitchen: its an irksome accessory,
that lid, it never quite manages to combine its two tasks of concealing the
rubbish and getting out of the way when you have to chuck more in. The

compromise one settles for involves keeping it at an angle, a bit like a mouth
opening, trapping it between the bucket and the wall in precarious equilib-
rium. . . . That transfer from one container to another, which for most inhabi-
tants of the metropolis takes on the significance of a passage from public to
private, for me, in our house, in the garage where we keep the big poubelle
during the day, is only the last gesture of the ceremonial upon which the
private is founded. (Calvino, 1993: 96)
But unlike most waste education, Calvino thinks about these practices
in terms of their phenomenological and sacred resonances. The pleasure he
gets from putting out the garbage is not the pleasure of being virtuous, of
being a good sort, it is the pleasure of ritual and order that connect him
to the sacred. The gesture of throwing away is the first and indispensable
condition of being (1993: 104), for one is what one does not throw away.
In the purifying ritual of putting out the rubbish we not only confirm what
we are, the boundaries of the self, we also create the conditions for renewal.
For Calvino every act of rubbish disposal is a little funeral that postpones
our own inevitable demise, it is an offering made to the underworld, to the
gods of death and loss (1993: 104).
What is so startling about Calvinos essay is its absence of guilt and resent-
ment. He does not experience putting out the rubbish as coercion or moral
duty, although he is aware of the municipal rules that structure his practices.
For him, rubbish has other values and meanings; its disciplines, its rituals,
awaken him to the pleasures of self-cultivation. Waste here is not something
to be reduced, recycled, reused; he does not frame his relation to it through
the discourses of environmental awareness (not that I think Calvino is
opposed to these). Rather, it is a fundamental component of the arts of exist-
ence, of the sensibilities that give meaning and order to the self. It is an
activity through which we are able to query ways of being. Calvinos ethos
of waste blurs the distinctions between thinking and feeling; putting out the
garbage is both an intellectual and a spiritual experience. Its effects rever-
berate through several registers of being. Through waste practices we sense
the limits of the self and connect with wider forces. In enjoying waste, in
deriving pleasure from the careful management of loss and disposal, we
become aware of the presence of the sacred in the most mundane of actions.
In his reveries on rubbish, Calvino is open to the ways in which waste
management alludes to other ways of being: the inevitability of death, the
profound resonances of ritual, the sensuality and pleasure in ordering.
Unlike the letter writer incensed about recycling, Calvino has no anxiety
about the boundaries between himself and his garbage. Instead of stinginess
and irritation he expresses openness and generosity. Instead of a binary, a
fixed opposition, he sees an active relation, a movement in which the iden-
tities of waste and the self are implicated in each other. This is an evocative
account of relationality, of the liminal space where separation meets

connection. Calvino does not deny the necessity of disposal putting out
the garbage is a gesture of separation that prevents merger and contami-
nation, but it is also, paradoxically, connection. For separation is a relation,
it is not the opposite of connection to experience ourselves as separate
from rubbish is to be in a relation with it, to be connected. This is the messi-
ness, the ambiguity that marks our relations with rubbish and exposes the
fantasy of a pure and stable morality. And this is the messiness and ambi-
guity that makes ethical work experimental, creative, relational.
These may seem weak, even pathetic, alternatives to the power and
urgency of campaigns based on guilt and mastery. But much like the plastic
bag scene in American Beauty they recognize a wider range of responses to
rubbish than moralism ever does. They implicitly speak to our plurivocity
of being, they acknowledge our dependence on waste, the ways in which we
need it to maintain a bounded self, but they dont convert this dependence
into resentment or fear. Connolly suggests that the most complex ethical
issues arise in contexts where intense suffering is implicated in securing the
self-confidence, wholeness, transcendence and cultural merit of others. That
is, the most intense, intractable cases of suffering are political in character.
They often revolve around . . . the politics of becoming (1999: 51). There
is no doubt that the environment, nature, is suffering because of the burden
of our excessive waste; that our sense of mastery over nature emerges, in
part, from our capacity to dump waste on it. As Serres (1995) says, one of
the ways in which we master and possess nature is by fouling it. But in
seeking to change this, politics driven by the logics of moral imperatives and
disciplinary individualism can go only so far. A politics of becoming pro-
ceeds from those responses to waste that unsettle mastery, those intensities
that signal not our difference from waste but our profound implications
with it. To be moved by waste, to be disturbed by it, is to be open to our
own becoming. It is to be able to cultivate a care and sensibility for it that
is also at the same time a cultivation of the arts of transience.
Notes
Many thanks to David Halperin for his tough and incisive reading of the first
draft of this paper, to Maureen Burns for introducing me to the Enjoy Your
Garbage campaign and for her generous feedback, and to Kathy Gibson and
John Frow for valuable comments.
1 The capacity to throw things out is often hard to acquire. Children can some-
times take a lot of convincing that something is ready for the bin in their
systems of value it may be part of a collection, part of a game that may be
played again in the future. Whatever the justification, the category of rubbish
has quite different meanings for them.

2 This is Strassers (1999: 271) point. Unfortunately she does not elaborate it,
nor does she really examine the significance of this blindness about waste for
the self.
3 See T. Tierney (1993). Tierney argues that techno-fetishism is ultimately predi-
cated on a fear and evasion of death and a desire to overcome the inconve-
nient body.
4 See D. Shuttlesworth (1973).
5 Of course, there are plenty of people who experience new rubbish regulations
as coercive and repressive, evidence of governmental desire to control aspects
of private life. I consider an example of this later in this section.
6 Making sense of conscience has been a significant focus of post-Foucauldian
accounts of the subject. Judith Butlers (1997) dialogue with Foucault in The
Psychic Life of Power is driven by the desire to think his theory of power
together with a theory of the psyche. If interpellation is the moment when the
subject is affected by subordination and normalization the moment when
we turn guiltily to the voice of the law Butler argues that what is needed is
an understanding of the psychic operations of regulatory norms, a theory of
conscience. Butlers account of interiority focuses on how norms and disci-
plines assume a psychic character, on the moments whereby a subject turns
on itself and works in tandem with processes of social regulation. This process
reveals the complex ways in which power is reiterated within the subject, the
ways in which we become guilty.
7 See Bennett (1996) for an excellent discussion of the relationship between
ethics and aesthetics in Foucault.
8 See, for example, Dean (1996).
References
Bennett, Jane (1996) How Is It, Then, That We Still Remain Barbarians?,
Political Theory 24(4): 65372.
Butler, Judith (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press.
Calvino, Italo (1993) La Poubelle Agree, in The Road to San Giovanni, pp.
93126. London: Jonathan Cape.
Connolly, William (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Cruikshank, Barbara (1999) The Will to Empower. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Dean, Mitchell (1996) Foucault, Government and the Enfolding of Authority,
pp. 209-29 in A. Barry, T. Osborne, N. Rose (eds) Foucault and Political
Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Deleuze, Gilles (1995) Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari (1988) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. London: The Athlone Press.
Foucault, Michel (1990) The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books.
Hunter, Ian (1993) Subjectivity and Government, Economy and Society 22(1):
12334.
Phillips, Adam (1999) Darwins Worms. London: Faber & Faber.
Poovey, Mary (1995) Making a Social Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Serres, Michel (1995) The Natural Contract. Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press.
Shuttlesworth, Dorothy (1973) Litter: The Ugly Enemy. New York: Doubleday.
Strasser, Susan (1999) Waste and Want. New York: Metropolitan Books.
Tierney, Thomas (1993) The Value of Convenience. New York: State University
of New York Press.
GAY HAWKINS is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and

Communications, University of New South Wales, Sydney. She writes on
governmentality and media policy, poststructuralist theory, and rubbish.
In 1993 she published From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing
Community Arts (Allen & Unwin). She is currently writing a book on the
ethics of waste. Address: School of Media and Communications, Faculty
of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, 2052, Sydney,
Australia. [email: G.Hawkins@unsw.edu.au]


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International Journal of Cultural

Plastic bags: Living with rubbish

The online version of this article can be found at:

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Copyright 2001 SAGE Publications

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the meanings of waste in our everyday

lives. It argues that a changing relation to waste is a changing relation to self. It

KEYWORDS becoming conscience disposal environmentalism

There was a scene in American Beauty that prompted a wholly unexpected

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6 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 7

gesture of desperate separation that is never completely successful. Its too

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8 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

reactions and questions help develop an understanding of the ethics of

We need to get rid of things. Waste is something we all have to manage.

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 9

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longer a sign of individual purification but of pollution, evidence of an

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12 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

Putting out the garbage

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 13

home, to instructions on how we should be around our rubbish; much more

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14 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

While in favour of recycling, the new, excessively complicated arrangements

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 15

Ethics and the politics of becoming

If we accept that disposal is necessary, how could it be recast in ways that

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16 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

righteousness or resentment? Domestic waste education seeks to order

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 17

So it is to Connollys rich and suggestive dialogue with Deleuze and

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 19

as a gift, in cultivating a sensibility for it we are cultivating a waste ethos

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20 I N T E R N AT I O N A L journal of C U LT U R A L studies 4(1)

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 21

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Hawkins Living with rubbish 23

GAY HAWKINS is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and

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