So, What is Garbage, Any Way? Part I

To begin with, garbage is the most quotidian form of waste. We produce garbage every day, and every day we are very likely to see it and smell it in our kitchen trashcan or in the streets. But what is garbage, more specifically?

We do not simply coexist side by side with garbage as part of nature, we produce garbage; this production is a process that in very basic terms could be described as follows: humans take material resources and transform them according to a certain set of necessities; these necessities dictate the form that the plucked resources will acquire, and once said necessities are satisfied, the materiality of the transformed resource will be deemed useless and discarded.

Put in such basic terms could be misleading, though, because they lead to abstraction and that leads to thinking that producing garbage is part of the human nature, always have and always will. It is not so. To be sure, of course, there is always a material remnant left after human interaction with nature, which in turn is the very essence of the human species-life. But the WAY in which we appropiate nature to turn it into useful objects and how we discard the material remnants once their utility has been exhausted, has changed constantly through history.

The United States, for instance, have more than doubled their daily garbage production in the last thirty years. The contents and the amount of the garbage that get to the landfills today is radically different from that which got buried in a hole on the ground in the 19th century. Given that garbage changes historically,  if we were to stand atop of one of the man-made mountains of trash of a modern landfill, we would have the opportunity to contemplate the materiality of our economic system, of our social organization, of our historical moment.

The image above is by Mexican painter Francisco Goitia, it is called “The Old Man in the Dumpsite” / “El viejo en el muladar.” This man sitting on top of a heap of trash looks like a modern-day prophet who looks straight into our eyes, like suggesting that he knows us because he lives surrounded by our daily discards.

And in a very real way, there is something profoundly human in trash. This might even sound like a truism, but it is not without its complexities. The tons of garbage that are buried everyday are made up not only of organic material and plastic, all those objects take hours-worth of human labor with them to their grave.  The worker that transformed the raw material to produce a commodity, used his/her inner most human quality—that of transforming nature to satisfy human needs—to produce that object. S/he was then “compensated” with an amount of money minor to the value of the thing in the market, while the object that bare his/her mark was estranged.

Matter, human activity, human nature, and use value make up the  contents of those interminable putrid mountains that are the landscape of landfills. If accumulation of commodities is one of the goals of capitalist production-consumption, then, standing atop of an odorous heap of garbage we would not be witnessing an unfortunate albeit necessary by-product of modern capitalist industriousness, we would be in the presence of the material evidence of its undeniable triumph.