This _Article concentrates on the domestic reuse and repurposing of packaging as a form of material life in Estonian households, and on the material and historical background of reuse and repurposing. The Estonian case reflects the country’s Soviet past, when reuse, repurpose and DIY mentality were an essential part of consumer culture. Reuse and repurposing are creative forms of human engagement with the materiality of packaging, that contribute to the process of becoming new things. Reuse follows the shape and useful functionalities of packaging, and repurposing, which alters the original shape through material transformations, follows the useful potential of the material and its physical properties. People have often thought of packaging not as object, but as potentially useful material, something that is evident in some traditional and vernacular reuse and repurposing methods in which materials and their physical properties have cultural value. From the New Materialist perspective, packaging is mutable material that supports some culturally persistent reuse and repurposing traditions.

This _Article explores the racial and geographic dimensions of disposability and extractive use to conceptualize the contemporary relationship among waste, plastics, and people, particularly in the U.S. South. In their essay, “Mapping Black Ecologies,” JT Roane and Justin Hosbey argue that the eco-social knowledges within Black Southern and other African diasporic communities must frame interventions in the face of environmental crises. As a discipline, Black Ecologies offers a lens to analyze eco-social hauntings across space, time, and matter, providing flight paths beyond ecocidal futurity. Environmental justice scholarship demonstrates that the materiality of waste definitively and disproportionately impacts Black health. What is considered trash today is undoubtedly tied to a historical continuum of disposed-of matters, animate and otherwise, that precedes and exceeds a myopic understanding of ‘trash’ as plastic or other material waste. We argue that contemporary pollution often ends up in majority-Black elsewheres in the U.S. South and exists in spatial-temporal relation to systems of conquest and captivity. Combating this form of ongoing racial enclosure, Southern Black folks challenge the rigged notions of value through quotidian negotiations: coalition building, political advocacy, protests, and more. To conclude, we illustrate the need for iterative, emergent strategies that resist wastelanding by wrestling not only with the materiality of pollution but also with the sociological and relational underpinnings of disposability itself.

This _Article explores the way in which Wilhelm Raabe’s 1884 novel Pfisters Mühle: Ein Sommerferienheft signals and depicts how society’s transition into industrial capitalist conditions leads to discarding previously valued forms of social and economic arrangement. To demonstrate this process, this paper utilizes aspects of Michael Thompson’s rubbish theory that find resonance in the novel’s depiction, as the system of values that had symbolized a more rural manner of living gradually change from a durable to a rubbish state. In Raabe’s novel, that process is depicted with a sugar factory, Krickerode, polluting the waters upstream from Pfister’s mill. This leads to the closure of the mill, Bertram Pfister’s death, and the way of life they together represent. Evidence for the reconfiguration of societal values according to industrial capitalist priorities (i.e., commodification and capital accumulation) arises when, in reaction to the pollution and its devastating effects, characters shift attention to decision-making on the part of mill’s proprietor, Bertram, using a nascent finance language. Why didn’t he cofound (mitgründen) or purchase stocks (Aktien) in the sugar factory? Why not become a shareholder (Aktionär) and become a partner to progress, rather than, as it is implied, a victim? This paper concludes by examining how the narrator’s account and its transformation into rubbish become its own repository of non-valued value that stands outside the trappings of any given system.

_Abstract

This _Article explores the intersection of urban beautification and caste in contemporary Indian cities, with specific focus on commissioned works of street art which are part of urban cleanliness campaigns. Over the past three decades, state-sponsored urban improvement schemes have aimed at eradicating perceived ‘dirt’ from cities, often employing street artists to promote urban beautification and cleanliness. Within the apparently inherent connection between beauty, sanitation and citizenship in Indian cities, an attempt at establishing an urban aesthetics of clean(s)ing is discernible, specifically in New Delhi. This _Article argues that the utilization of urban aesthetic practices like street art, particularly as a means to combat ‘dirt,’ emerges from caste-based and revanchist visions of the Indian public sphere. Through case studies, it shows how murals are employed to promote ideals of cleanliness that reflect upper-caste values that serve to transform urban spaces while policing oppressed-caste and working-class residents. Building on analyses of spatial transgression, such as Mary Douglas’ idea of dirt as “matter out of place,” Tim Cresswell’s notion of graffiti as “words out of place,” and D. Asher Ghertner’s concept of “aesthetic governmentality,” it explores the discursive procedures through which certain types of bodies and symbols are declared as illegal/illegible or dirty/disgusting in the Indian city. The _Article will show how street and other forms of art may embody and/or critique these prevalent notions of socio-spatial order.

The _Essay explores affective and cultural legacies embedded in disposal architectures. Drawing on various theories of waste, it examines the material histories of domestic disposal and notions of affect and belonging. Central questions include how the design, function, and everyday use of disposal systems shape perceptions of waste; how these architectures relate to notions of citizenship; and how waste is perceived as either a social good or a mere trace of survival. In different literary and cultural contexts, the _Essay examines historically shaped distinctions between purity and pollution, necessity and excess, and structure and disorder through the lenses of Lauren Berlant’s concept of intimate publics and cultural theories of waste.

Plastic, cement and nuclear waste will not only outlast us as individuals, but probably also as a species. What we pejoratively call ‘trash’ is that which will stand for us the longest. All our languages, cultures, and communications will be incomprehensible, and it is our waste that will represent us most virulently in the post-human life. In this sense, the speculative religion-turned-artistic project Toxic Temple regards our trash as a transcendent form of communication. Religion and spirituality were always means of speculating about the more-than-human and the beyond-human. At a time in which religion, at least in a European context, has lost its centrality in how we negotiate our desire for eternity, such eternity has instead become immanent in the form of trash, haunting us both in our present moment and in our possible futures. This essayistic, semi-scholastic contribution to On_Culture presents some of the central pillars of this speculative religion of trash, asking questions about wastefulness and eternity that exceed the boundaries between science, art, the humanities, and religion.

Obsolescence presents an opportunity to reflect on the impermanence of human presence. The ontological unpredictability of the obsolete means that objects relegated to social peripheries can unexpectedly solicit attention. Building off of a personal encounter with a discarded shoe sole jutting out of sand on the beach, this _Perspective examines how the obsolete objects that appear in Mike Nelson’s installation artworks are changed by their reappearance in his 2023 survey at the Hayward Gallery, a brutalist art gallery at the Southbank Centre in Central London. Nelson is a contemporary British installation artist who constructs large-scale dreamlike environments out of the very real detritus of post-industrial ruins. By forcing an encounter between trashed objects and spectators passing through gallery space, Nelson troubles the ocular habit that keeps waste out of sight (and out of institutional site). This _Perspective traces Nelson’s practice of forming and later reforming trash into sculptural installations, and considers how the obsolescence of his chosen materials can frustrate fixed categorizations of site, spectator, and sculpture.