Trash as a Means of Religious Communication

Warm Greetings to the General Heathen Public from the Toxic Temple

Fig. 1: Mundane ritualistic life at the Toxic Temple, Donaufestival 2023, © David Visnjic Trash inhabits an ambivalent, almost contradictory discursive place in our society. On the one hand, ‘trash’ is what we consider not-worthwhile, ephemeral, and uninteresting. Movies, novels, or other products regarded as ‘trash’ are believed to contain little of lasting value—one might enjoy consuming them, but they will have no historic or cultural impact. Similarly, in consumer goods, ‘trash’ is often what is wrapped around the desired product, protecting one’s purchase from the outside world; once its seal is broken and the product obtained, its packaging loses all value. When you rush into the supermarket to pacify your bodily needs—buying a premade sandwich, for example—what encloses your desired good hardly registers your attention; you tear the plastic open and gulp down the sandwich, noticing little about the wrapping before you dispose of it in a nearby trash-can. …That is, you would act that way if you were still what we of the Toxic Temple [1] consider a ‘heathen’: somebody who has not yet recognized our modern consumer trash as communication with the afterlife, and every act of disposing of it as a prayer to eternity. Whereas within a still-majoritarian, individualist consumer logic of heathens, trash is ephemeral and epiphenomenal, from a larger-than-human, geological point of view, trash is what will outlive us. Trash is the durable and lasting element of our consumer culture. The plastic wrapping of my sandwich will leave traces on the face of the Earth for almost infinitely longer than the time I spent enjoying my sandwich, longer than the time my meandering intestines took to digest it and shit it out again, even longer than it will take the body that once held these intestines to decay and decompose, next to the shit that I produced as long as I was alive. In the Toxic Temple, we try to reconcile our lost ways of ecocidal modern consumer life with these cosmological consequences: we whisper humble prayers when we bid farewell to the plastic container of our frail organic nutrition—solemnly admiring the longevity of its material and the long-lasting effects it has on the order of the cosmos turned chaosmos. What heathens consider ‘trash’ in fact embodies our culture itself—in all its achievements and failings—for far longer than do the human bodies and minds that are conventionally considered to be the agents of cultural production.…

After Trash

Temperament of Penicillium Societies

1_Introduction This _Perspective examines the Penicillium family as a case study to explore the interaction between life and the environment. As one of the oldest ethnic communities, the Penicillium family has existed for 3.5 billion years. The study used ethnography as a form of qualitative inquiry to track the migration, kinship, and living habits of Penicillium community residents. Here, sensory ethnography and go-along interviews provide the method that allows delving into intimate social and personal aspects of the Penicillium family. Ethnography serves as an effective approach to creating a productive connection between biology, the human material body, social practices, and the social sciences. [17] According to Foucault, the biopolitics concerned with the human species or human populations means managing reproduction, births and deaths, behavior, and health and sanitation. [18] Haraway extends this scope to hybrid entities that involve multiple species’ boundaries. She emphasizes interspecies relationships, where humans become human through interactions with environmental materials and companion species. [19] Along with the burgeoning of technoscience, more beings (are able to) become embroiled in this entanglement. The concept of trans-biopolitics highlights the power dynamics involving both human and nonhuman populations, as well as their flesh, organs, tissues, and cells. [20] One of the ways to respond to those power relationships is to add those actors into the social analysis. Therefore, the shifting of the right to interpret, the knowledge production in different situations, and the method of non-human translation by crossing disciplines are important. This piece of writing is an experiment in translating the microbes’ language. The stories I collected from Garbageland and Continent B reveal the territorial occupation, survival strategies, and emotional entanglements of the Penicillium family history. Analyzing the fieldwork enables rethinking the boundaries of life as a form and its definition. 2_Methods In past decades, the debate about the binary opposition of human and nature has become increasingly nuanced and complex, interweaving various perspectives on their interdependence. The term ‘Anthropocene’ identifies the significant impact of human behavior on the planet. To investigate other living beings, I conducted fieldwork on the planet Garbageland, which is one of the most biodiverse places in the universe. The vast expanse of ground is home to billions of species (of creatures), many of which have yet to be discovered and documented by science. It is a complicated environment for me; I am surrounded by birth and death as the creatures living in this land…

Obsolescence and Extinction in Mike Nelson’s Installation Artworks

Fig 1: Artwork by the author Prologue_The Sole I was arrested by a sole (Fig. 2). The rubber had been worn smooth where the ball of a foot would rub against the ground. Were it not for the smooth surface that seemed to repel sand, the pale brown sandal may not have even drawn my gaze. Its ability to solicit my attention had to do with its past usage. It must have been well-worn to be so smooth—perhaps it once belonged to a favorite pair of shoes; perhaps it was second-hand. The remaining grooves, which may have originally fostered information about the make or brand, were clogged with sand. After turning it over, the sole revealed itself to be just that: it was not a sandal anymore, save for a broken strap. When something breaks or becomes outmoded, the tendency habituated in us as consumers is to throw the thing out. J.K. Gibson-Graham describes how hyper-separation from the nonhuman has caused humans to treat nature as “our dominion, our servant, our resource and receptacle.” [32] Although we create and engage with trash every day, waste is more often than not treated as out of sight and out of mind once it has been discarded. Timothy Morton theorizes that anthropogenic attitudes have caused the environment to be treated as a type of unconscious. While critically expanding what is meant by ‘nature’ in Ecology Without Nature, Morton very deliberately summarizes the book’s message using the narrowing metaphor of waste disposal: “When you think about where your waste goes, your world starts to shrink.” [33] Put otherwise, when waste flashes up from the background of our attention, the discomforting interconnections between human and nonhuman bodies become legible, and the illusion of hyper-separation shatters. Fig. 2: ‘Sandal,’ East Sands St. Andrews, April 2023, © Polly Bodgener Industry is eating away at the tolerance margins of nature, the nonhuman-as-receptacle is overflowing, and trash is becoming harder to ignore. As Tim Edensor notes, obsolete objects “draw attention to the unprecedented material destruction wrought by an accelerating capitalism.” [34] No longer a sandal, the sole was ontologically unpredictable. It challenged rather than affirmed how I walked on the beach. Noticing it located me inside rather than outside of the receptacle. It forced me to notice the connections between myself, the nonhuman environment, waste production, and other humans. Babette Tischleder and Sarah Wasserman suggest that obsolescence makes a…

Producing Trash

The Labor of Difficult Theory in the University

1_Introduction In the university, teachers and students alike constantly produce trash: knowledge, represented in formal and informal verbal and written statements, that fails to meet the institutional standards of quality. Such knowledge isn’t inherently trashy; rather, it is turned into trash. Epistemic content undergoes a process of evaluation against formal (structure, clarity, length, language, and so forth) and substantive criteria (argument, originality, contribution, etc.); once evaluated—for instance, in a seminar discussion, or in the grading of a paper—and its areas of failure established, a verdict is issued. Whether in the eye roll of a colleague, a teacher’s attempt at verbal correction, or the return of a marked paper, the enunciation of the verdict accomplishes an act of failing, instantaneously transforming the pending ‘knowledge’ into ‘trash.’ [63] When I reflect on epistemic trash, I think of a particular piece of my own writing: a draft chapter of my dissertation for the SOAS University of London’s Master of Research (MRes) in Politics with Language (Japanese). I titled my (final) dissertation: “The German Red Army Faction and the ‘War on Terror.’” In my MRes dissertation, I set out to illuminate the reconfiguration of the discourse of the Red Army Faction (RAF, a left-wing terrorist group in postwar West-Germany) in the post-9/11 ‘war on terror.’ I worked with the tentative thesis that in the ‘war on terror,’ the othering of non-Western Islamist terrorists facilitated a transformation of the RAF from a condemnable renegade into a preferable enemy because the RAF’s familiarity now constituted it as an intelligible opponent. Until 2017, the intercollegiate SOAS Politics MRes program with Birkbeck University of London was a two-year program that accepted students from different disciplinary backgrounds and offered students training in social science methods. Teaching staff at SOAS often emphasized the unique preparation this degree offered for a subsequent academic career, reflected in part in the 25,000-word dissertations that MRes students produced (compared to a more typical 10,000-word limit). In this essay, however, I refer to the recent SOAS guidelines and assessment criteria for such 10,000-word dissertations in one-year Politics Master’s programs. These guidelines more closely resemble the requirements of other higher education institutions across the United Kingdom (UK). [64] In my experience, however, SOAS is uniquely open towards heterodox methods, as well as methodological and theoretical approaches and the study of ‘niche’ empirical phenomena. After completing my MRes, I continued under the same supervisors at SOAS to…

Please Go Away… We’re Reading

A Practice Approach to a Taken-for-Granted Academic Craft

Fig. 1: Academic evening reading 1_Introduction The Danish verb for reading, læse, also means studying: I study anthropology = jeg læser antropologi. Similar is the Finnish “luen,” as in luen antropologiaa. On the other hand, the Finnish noun for a lecture, luento, is “a situation of reading.” The German noun for a lecture, Vorlesung is literally an “event of reading in front of someone,” a meaning we shall return to. Different languages engage with reading in different ways. Some indicate the intimate relationship between reading and study(ing), between reading and knowledge practices. Nonetheless, reading practices and the modes of reading in academia are rarely thematized within academic discourse. The practice of reading is rarely an object of epistemic exchanges in seminars, at conferences, and among colleagues. It is as if reading were such a matter of course for the professional reader, that it is not worth academic attention, much like going to the bathroom or sleeping. In the following, we present a range of perspectives on this aspect of professional reading. In “Good Readers and Good Writers,” the novelist Vladimir Nabokov claims that the text is not a finished object but is designed to be completed through reading; there is only rereading and rethinking in the process of reading. [120] Such reasoning is not alien to Science and Technology Studies (STS); as a field, STS is interested in scientific knowledge production, focusing crucially on the technical apparatus and social practices involved in the production of science. In their classic, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar characterize laboratory practice as text production saturated with description devices. [121] The premise is that these productions are eventually read one way or another. Furthermore, reading as a diverse practice has been mythologized and its multiplicity thereby reduced. [122] For example, although Friedrich Nietzsche documented his cursory ways of reading, [123] this practice was systematically ousted from the history of Nietzsche’s reception. [124] It might be more appropriate to think of an ‘ecology of reading,’ [125] where different ways of reading cohabit. In other words, there might be a specific myth of reading, [126] but not only one mode of reading practice. In this paper, we investigate reading as an academic practice based on auto-ethnographic exchanges among ourselves. We, the authors of this _Perspective, are all academics and therefore experts in academic reading. Some of us are students,…