Aesthetic Fatigue

This is from the Introduction to Aesthetic Fatigue: Modernity and the Language of Waste, which is a volume that has its origins in a 2006 conference that I chaired at the University of St Andrews as part of the work of the AHRC Centre for Environmental History. Notes on the contributors can be found at the end of this text.

George Kubler in his book The Shape of Time elaborates an idea of “aesthetic fatigue” that might serve to encapsulate much of what, in this volume, seems to be characteristic of waste — its relation to time, to energy, to modernity’s desire for evermore perfect designs and forms of living — and to why we discard the past and the stuff that once adorned our world. Overfamiliarity, Kubler suggests, makes us tired of the way the world looks; it makes the world itself look tired. “Waste,” as this book aims to show, is a multifaceted phenomenon — a by-product of technological progress, of efforts at landscape improvement and rational efficiency, of self-consciousness and of a jaded familiarity with the way things are. But it is also simply a by-product of living, which is essentially the expenditure of energy that is fed by the use we make of our environment.

What Aesthetic Fatigue therefore aims to do is look at how waste has been represented, imagined, narrated, analysed, and how, in its various manifestations — as material stuff, moral lack, or other spectral presence — it has transformed the nature of everyday life in modernity. While the essays that are presented in this volume represent a variety of academic traditions and disciplinary specialisms, they have in common shared themes, conceptual unities, and a concern with the very language of waste. Aesthetic Fatigue begins with considerations of early modern ideas of waste in the understanding of landscape, and works through literary, artistic, philosophical, social and economic considerations of waste as a key to understanding modern life.

Fredrik Albritton Jonsson’s essay on eighteenth-century wasteland “improvement” in the Scottish Highlands focuses on the role of marginal lands as the medium through which a hybrid modernity of agricultural productivity and traditional political loyalties was developed, and in which the socially redemptive powers of peat moss and a “wasteland mania” acted as a critique of the industrialism and revolutionary radicalism that was gripping societies elsewhere at the time. Jill Payne’s essay moves the discussion of the Highland “wasteland” as an under-used resource into the twentieth century when the economic and geographic potential for large-scale development in the Scottish Highlands was arguably at its greatest. But, as she argues, the twentieth-century veneration of the region’s outstanding natural beauty is the product of an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stress on the importance of seeing in such natural environments an alternative to industrialization, and a world that seemed to exist beyond the utilitarian emphasis on “progress.” This examination of hydroelectric development explores how the potential for improvement contradicted and threatened visions of the Highland landscape that had taken root in the aftermath of the rise of Romantic idealism, laying bare competing twentieth-century ideas about the “best use” of non-urban space, and the associated language of “waste” and “wasteland.”

My own essay looks at the example of the Mojave Desert as, variously, a space of liminal encounters, military research, and play, in order to explore how cultural and phenomenological dimensions of forget-ting can inform a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which “waste” and “wastelands” are manifested in contemporary life, yet at the same time obscured in their real dimensions and serious consequences. Steven Connor’s consideration of air pollution focuses on how the very idea of air has changed as a result of an awareness that the atmosphere itself had, in modernity, become the target of waste dumping in the form of a variety of aerial rejectamenta.

The next three essays have as a focus ideas about waste that drove ideas about political economy and sanitation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Piers Hale’s essay looks at the relationship between waste, nature and social justice by focusing on the emergent “green politics” of the nineteenth-century English writer William Morris — who saw the wasteful organization of labour in society as a means through which socialist ideas about the inequities of capitalism could be revealed and addressed — and the contrasting ideas of political economy popular at that time (in, for example, the writings of Herbert Spencer), which were under-pinned by a belief in a form of social Darwinism that rested significantly on an association between human nature and the natural environment. William Kupinse’s essay examines the widespread use of waste as rhetorical device in the writing of H. G. Wells, and argues that closer examination reveals that two related issues inform the body of Wells’s oeuvre: the utopian impulse that manifests itself in Wells’s various programs of political and social reform, and Wells’s concept of “waste” as a negative motive force driving his utopianism. It is a reading that reveals Wells’s systematic exploration of the cultural construction of value, and aims to sketch the epistemological underpinnings of waste in the early twentieth century.

Alberto Duman’s “The Future as a Virus in the Midst of our Waste” is concerned with the management of waste matter and hygienic practices in utopian projections of nineteenth century British urban planning, which he ties into concerns about the future of waste management and urban development through a description of his own 2006 artistic project — the “Lamby Way Time Capsule” — which proposed the burial of a time capsule within the imminently closing landfill facilities at Lamby Way in Cardiff. The purpose of the time capsule, Duman explains, was to function as a reversed viral presence, keeping alive a particular discourse of the landfill, and thus waste, in the face of the planned aestheticization of the site which, of course, would continue a modern trend of obscuring the reality of waste.

The following three essays by William Viney, Maura Coughlin and Jaimey Hamilton examine how artists have made use of a variety of wastes to comment upon aspects of modernity. Viney’s essay looks at the figure of the ruin in modern culture and as represented in the work of Hubert Robert, Joseph Gandy and other artists. It is the vision of ruin, he suggests, that has often allowed us to imagine the future as something that might have a different temporal shape than the past and present. In contrast to the ruins of architecture, Maura Coughlin’s essay draws our attention to modern ruins of another kind — in the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne whose paintings of quarries dwell on what she terms “the feral remains of capitalist exploitation of natural resources.” As she illustrates, theirs was not an entirely escapist construction of nature (considered, for instance, as the pristine, prelapsarian other to urban modernity) but rather an engagement with the awkward, ugly remains of modern exploitation. Jaimey Hamilton’s study of French Nouveau Réaliste artist Arman looks at works such as 1973’s La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast) — a Plexiglas box filled with Seven-Up bottles, milk cartons, canned tomato tins, and detergent boxes embedded in clear polyester — as an example of how art reflected the activity of “wasting” in contemporary consumer culture. And, following Georges Bataille analysis of the role that the “accursed share” plays in culture, for Hamilton, Arman’s spectacles of waste (glass vitrines, like a shop window, that transform something as abject as trash into image, and then image into a luxury art object) are seen as useful allegories for the paradoxical relationship between commodities and waste.

What we might term the affective dimensions of “waste” occupy the authors of the next three essays. Edward Gitre looks at how the Second World War opened a new chapter on the history of boredom, a social malaise that he suggests became a common feature of an American culture and society overly acquainted with the nervous exhaustion and overstimulation occasioned by modern warfare, as the “retreads” of war (returning soldiers struggling to adjust to normality) illustrate some of the unintended consequences of war’s destructive acceleration of human experience. Next to the suburban unease of ex-servicemen that Gitre identifies, Rex Ferguson’s essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby explores how that novel’s grand settings of East and West Egg, as well as the debonair personality of Jay Gatsby and the phantasmagoric imagery of his extravagant parties, provides the context for one of the most telling depictions of the relationship between modernity and waste in literature. He suggests that the major themes of the novel — such as purity, transience and idealism — are all, in fact, underpinned by the spectre of waste. Finally, Harvie Ferguson returns to the question of boredom with a more philosophical probing of the experiential conditions of modernity. His essay plots the ways in which lethargy, a lack of interest in life, and an engulfing sense of indifference to the world are bound together in a peculiar unity that is distinctive of modern society. He further suggests that while repulsion, defilement, and fear of contagion are possible experiences in any society, for modern society, they constitute the peculiar aesthetic-moral unity of disgust. In the case of both boredom and disgust, he argues, the significance of the peculiarity of their modern dimensions has to be seen through a phenomenology of waste.

The final three essays develop approaches to understanding material wastes and how we dispose of them. Tim Cooper’s essay observes that while capitalist modernity may depend upon waste, it nonetheless claims to be able to reabsorb its own leftovers, and to reincorporate its own excretions. In a survey of the idea and application of recycling in twentieth century Britain, and its relationship to modern conceptions of waste, he ponders its role in the reinforcement of capitalist ideology. Jennifer Gabrys’s essay examines the consequences of the explosion in electronics and products such as personal computers (including their components) to reveal the often invisible nature of its wastes and contaminants, and also how these particular wastes spread into distant “spaces of remainder” that extend the waste ecologies of western societies. By investigating these spaces of electronic waste, she argues, we can begin to re-map technology through its remainders. In the final essay, Ray Stokes and Stephen Sambrook take a rather different approach to understanding how modernity has dealt with the unwanted stuff of everyday life by identifying trends in the developing business and economy of waste management — that is, through the ways that waste, at the level of local level, is collected, processed and disposed of — by focusing on the British public sector governance of the waste business with specific reference to the city of Glasgow in Scotland, which saw itself as a pioneer in waste management.

It is hoped that these essays and the issues they raise not only enliven the reader’s fascination with those parts of life, those spaces and behaviours we ordinarily consider to be negligible, but that through the diversity of its approaches it can stimulate further intellectual engagement about the lessons to be learned from modernity in relation to issues of environmental consciousness, time-awareness, and how we might live in less wasteful and more sustainable ways.

EDITORS

John Scanlan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. He was Project Officer at the AHRC Centre for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews between 2004-07. His books include On Garbage (Reaktion, 2005) and Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar (Reaktion, 2013).

John F. M. Clark is Director of the Institute for Environmental History at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Bugs and the Victorians (Yale University Press, 2009), as well as numerous papers on the history of the environment, science, and medicine.

CONTRIBUTORS

Maura Coughlin, Bryant University
John Scanlan, Manchester Metropolitan University
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago
Piers J. Hale, University of Oklahoma
William Viney, Durham University
Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London
Steven Connor, University of Cambridge
Jill Payne, University of Bristol
Rex Ferguson, University of Birmingham
Harvie Ferguson, University of Glasgow
Timothy Cooper, University of Exeter
Jaimey Hamilton, University of Hawaii at Manoa
Stephen Sambrook, University of Glasgow
Ray Stokes, University of Glasgow
Alberto Duman, Middlesex University
John F. M. Clark, University of St Andrews
Edward J.K. Gitre, Virginia Tech
William Kupinse, University of Puget Sound

Text © John Scanlan, 2013

CONTENTS

EDITORS

CONTRIBUTORS