Economy Of Garbage

Decentralization should not be confused with fragmentation. When implemented thoughtfully, decentralization’s cultural techniques can actually mitigate the negative effects of fragmentation. However, the most prominent contemporary manifestation of decentralization has fallen prey to an excess mindset. The initial excitement surrounding blockchain’s potential as an immutable and incorruptible ledger has been overshadowed by cryptocurrency’s promise of instant wealth—a notion that often resembles a pyramid scheme.

Critics might argue that decentralization inherently leads to fragmentation, citing examples like the proliferation of incompatible blockchain networks or the balkanization of online communities. However, this view overlooks the potential for decentralized systems to create new forms of connection and collaboration. For instance, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) demonstrate how dispersed individuals can work towards common goals without centralized control.

Rather than being the pinnacle of decentralization, crypto is better understood as a short resurgence of a mirage that had kept the end of the last millennium under its spell. The 1990’s held a sincere belief that capitalism and liberalism had solved all problems and history was close to its completion. Excess, and its antipode scarcity, played a central role in that narrative. Cold fusion was going to provide us with an inexhaustible source of energy, and the internet opened up a new virtual space that revolved around a boundless resource: information. And in such a world without limits, universal peace was obviously just around the corner.

Then the dotcom bubble burst, the twin towers were destroyed, and the inconvenient truth of climate change became slowly apparent.

The narrative of limitless progress, however, slowly resurfaced in the last few decades. But while capitalism, in its various forms, definitely did little to nothing to question it, the excess mindset cannot be entirely reduced to it either. Indeed, even as capitalism has evolved into diverse models - from stakeholder capitalism to conscious capitalism and beyond - the underlying premise of scarcity as an organizing principle has remained largely unchallenged. As Walter Benjamin most poignantly pointed out in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), the technical affordances of an era define its ideological affordances just as much as vice versa. If modern capitalism, in all its manifestations, depends on extraction and waste generation, it is only because it relies on means of production that facilitate it.

The field of attention shifts to the person who provides the apparatus. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.

— Walter Benjamin

Benjamin frames modernity as the process that eliminates physical and temporal scarcity as the limiting factor of humanity’s material progress. For example, cameras — even analogue ones — can capture a portrait in the same amount of time that it takes a painter to blink his eyes. And while his painting is unique, the camera’s snapshot can be reproduced infinitely. Technical innovation was already determined by the 10x mindset centuries long before the San Francisco valley decided to cut down its orange orchards and become silicon.

The discovery of a truly inexhaustible resource is not only capitalism’s holy grail of capitalism, it is also its achilles heel. Since scarcity is the ideology’s organizing principle, finding a resource that never runs out would paradoxically mean its own demise. It is thus not a coincidence that at the same time as Benjamin examined how the world would (stop to) function without scarcity, his close friend and accomplice Georges Bataille started exploring how an economy of excess would look like in his early essay The Notion of Expenditure. A theme that would define his entire oeuvre.

Like the venture capitalist of today, Bataille encourages activities that may seem wasteful or irrational within traditional economic frameworks. History teaches that it demands significant risks to reap innovative and potentially disruptive ideas. However, where the venture capitalist only focuses on the outliers and disposes the rest, Bataille does the exact opposite and chooses to embrace The Accursed Share (1949).

Expenditure is the magnificence of life; waste, dishonor, and the prodigal son are the disgrace of history.

— Georges Bataille

It is exactly this subtle shift in gaze that differentiates the abundance mindset from the excess mindset. Waste is not to be discarded with shame, it needs to be proudly embraced. Bataille’s call for an economy of excess is not a response to a lack of material abundance. On the contrary, it is the affirmation of abundance which leads him to challenge the prevailing emphasis on efficiency and utility. Bataille observes that this world contains far too much rather than too little energy. This abundance is manifested in the outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life’s basic chemical reactions.

Critics of Bataille might argue that his embrace of excess is irresponsible in a world facing resource depletion and environmental degradation. However, this critique misses Bataille’s point. He is not advocating for mindless consumption, but rather for a reconsideration of what we value and why. In a world of true abundance, the challenge becomes not how to acquire more, but how to give meaningfully. Affirming the fact of abundance is the starting point of Bataille’s economy of excess. It leads him to explore the non-utilitarian, symbolic, and psychological dimensions of human experience that can impossibly be fully satisfied by the purely material. As a result, Bataille ends up reconfiguring societal values and the human relationship with excess and wastefulness.

In her visionary practice, Garb-Age, Shraddha Borawake follows in Bataille’s footsteps by shifting the gaze towards the waste that life produces. She constantly blurs the lines between nature, culture, and trash. Tourist memorabilia are framed as if they were high art, throwaway lenses are depicted as if they were precious jewels, and all the garbage together shapes a landscape as breath-taking as those painted by the romantics.

The menacing pile audaciously boasts a landscape of the truth of use and disuse. Metallic composites stand assembled in a landslide of labels, packaging, logos, words, colors, signifiers and barcodes. Oil, butter, preservatives deodorants and other such containers stand witness to the consumption of a small urban sector. Within this miniscule demographic, it exposes a microscopic slice of a number of the sum total of the global lives and livelihoods; that have resulted in this conglomerate of irreducible substance.

— Shraddha Borawake

Borawake’s practice reveals that waste is not external to nature and culture but intrinsic to both. This realization challenges our conventional understanding of these realms, suggesting that they are not discrete, pure entities but rather interconnected, complex systems. Just as waste permeates nature and culture, the logic of garbage — fragmentation, dispersion, and excess — is equally present in these domains.

This perspective invites us to reconsider our notions of purity and authenticity, not only in culture but also in nature. While we have learned to be critical of such rhetoric in cultural contexts, especially following the atrocities of the Holocaust, nature has largely escaped this scrutiny. Borawake’s work extends this critical lens to the natural world, dismantling the idea of nature as a universal, unified whole.

Instead, we are presented with a vision of nature that mirrors the characteristics of waste: dispersed, fragmented, and abundant. This conceptualization aligns with the broader themes of decentralization and excess. Nature, like decentralized systems, is not a monolithic entity but a complex network of interconnected parts.

By embracing this perspective, we can move beyond the traditional dichotomies of nature versus culture, or purity versus waste. Instead, we can recognize the inherent abundance and excess in all aspects of our world. This shift in understanding has profound implications for how we approach environmental issues, resource management, and even our digital ecosystems.

In conclusion, economies of garbage are not just about waste management or environmental concerns. It is a paradigm shift that encourages us to see the world through the lens of abundance rather than scarcity. By acknowledging the excess inherent in nature, culture, and our technological systems, we open up new possibilities for addressing global challenges. This perspective invites us to reimagine our relationship with the world around us, fostering a more nuanced and holistic approach to the complexities of our interconnected existence.