Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean

Introduction

In one of his famous seminars, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan claims that the archeologists of the distant future will recognize waste as the most conspicuous heritage of our modern society (Lacan 2010). Lacan was not aware of anthropogenic climate change, so his idea that there will be archeologists in the distant future might sound paradoxically optimistic when compared to our contemporary discourses of ecological extinction. Yet, his statement highlights two crucial elements of our relationships with waste. On one hand, it emphasizes that our industrial and consumerist societies produce an amount of refuse that perhaps characterizes our age better than any other cultural product or artifact. On the other hand, it reminds us that waste has its own temporality that will likely outlast our human time, if not perhaps as a species, definitely as a specific historical incarnation. In a sense, waste is akin to Kafka’s Odradek: its entangled life is both familiar and extraneous, common and yet not fully graspable. Perhaps we, too, as Kafka’s ‘Family Man’, should find ‘the idea that [it] is likely to survive’ us ‘almost painful’ (Kafka 1995: 473).

This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownerships and temporalities. We tend to assume that we know what waste is and how it functions because we deal with it every day. Instead, whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape life and meanings. In fact, waste is neither just produced by individuals nor automatically disgusting, harmful, or morally offensive, as we tend to depict it. Rather, it belongs to a historically specific sociocultural system, a system that determines, at times not without contradictions, both its features and its meanings. This is the reason why a definition of waste can be elusive, at once leaking and porous, and many scholars in different disciplines have produced a vast literature attempting to disentangle waste from, say, discard or trash or pollution (for a general overview, see at least Strasser 1999; Rathje and Murphy 2001; Scanlan 2005; Falasca-Zamponi 2011; Zimring and Rathje 2012). As our readers will see, several of the essays in this edited volume mirror to a certain extent the challenge of coming up with a definition of waste that is discreet and with clear-contained boundaries. For the sake of this introduction, we will consider here two main distinct but intertwined understandings of waste that have crucial repercussions in our age marked by increasing socioecological distress: waste as a ‘thing’ and waste as ‘a set of socio-ecological relationships aiming to (re)produce exclusion and inequalities’ (Armiero 2021: 1).

As a thing, or rather an assemblage of things (Bennett 2004: 350), waste engages with the materiality of the world as well as with our own embodied materiality made of daily practices of production and consumption. This materiality cannot be underestimated because, as Susan Morrison reminds us, ‘without the material that is discarded, we cannot enter the realm of the metaphoric, of literature, and of the imagination’ (Morrison 2015: 8). Moreover, emphasizing the materiality of waste means to recognize more fully its complex and multi-layered temporality as waste is often understood as no-longer-useful objects: things that are consumed, that have, literally done their time. Consumption in fact needs time, or, to follow William Viney’s philosophical study of waste, ‘objects of waste […] provide occasions for temporal navigations’; their ‘use-time’, a particular kind of time, ‘provides an occasion where time materializes through use’ (Viney 2014: 5; 7). This, in turn, speaks of the ‘value’ of objects, which could be considered a ‘style of time keeping’ that crucially involves not only the past, but also the future, in that it is always ‘project oriented’, but also contains the implied interruption/consumption of that project/future (cfr Viney 2014: 7). As Brian Thill summarizes, ‘to talk about waste is to talk about every other object that has ever existed or will ever exist. Conversely, to talk about any object at all is to gesture toward its ultimate annihilated state. Waste is every object, plus time’ (Thill 2015: 8).

This relationship between the past and the future, between the projectuality and the discontinuity of waste is also part of Jane Bennett’s attempt to think of new onto-political and material orientations, as claimed in her Vibrant Matter. According to Bennett, waste and trash can in fact substantiate material assemblages that have their own ecological agency and power (Bennett 2009). From this perspective, the ‘thing’ that different forms of material waste create in leaving behind their status as ‘objects’ resists the binary epistemologies that have traditionally characterized our approach to the nonhuman world. As ‘thing-power’, it suggests both our own ‘embeddedness in a natural-cultural-technological assemblage’ (Bennett 2004: 361) and the possibility of waste to participate in ‘a vast network of agencies, which can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories’ (Iovino and Opperman 2014: 1). Moreover, waste has a material recalcitrance capable of confronting hegemonic cultural practices and products. Within the Italian context, for instance, some of the artworks made with humble and throwaway materials by the artists commonly identified as Arte Povera [Poor Art] provide a good example of the vitality of what has been discarded, at once challenging the values of the commercialized contemporary art system and engaging with a material reality as ordinary as inevitably impacted by anthropic exploitation.

Yet, even ‘thing-power’ and the new materialist approach to waste tend to emphasize individual experiences, focusing on waste and its potential agency as something we encounter (or it encounters us) ‘outside’. This is not surprising, as the ritual of taking out the trash—a regular practice usually officiated by some avatars of Kafka’s family man—is what comes first to mind when we think of our relationship with trash. However, even depositing part of our exceeding materiality outside is not a mere a private routine but engages with a public that, from basic hygiene to questions of morality and social status, rewards cleanliness, and purification. As Italo Calvino writes in ‘La Poubelle agréée’ (1990 [1977]), this everyday gesture of ‘taking out the trash’ can in fact be read as a cleansing ritual, seemingly necessary for establishing boundaries and, if we follow Calvino, also identity: ‘I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have’ (Calvino 1990: 103). Scholars have thus pointed out how even the otherwise commendable act of recycling underlines assumptions about social norms and moral cleansing (see, e.g., Czajkowski et al. 2017; Gholamzadehmir et al. 2019). As Armiero noted, though, underlying some of the social and psychological mechanisms behind recycling does not mean to undervalue such important practice and its potential benefits for the commons (Armiero 2021: 12; on the political dimensions of recycling, see also Jørgensen 2019; Liboiron 2021). Rather, it refocuses our attention from managing waste as the byproduct of individual choices to a realization that even the definition of bodily boundaries expressed implicitly by daily acts of waste disposals belongs to an interpersonal sphere that both anticipates and exceeds individual engagement.

It is from this perspective that waste reveals itself a set of relationships that make us think of the social, cultural, and political organization of modernity, of its narrative, and its proximities and segregations. What the scholars behind the Discard Studies website call ‘the popular and normative notions of waste’ (Discardstudies.com, n.p.) are in fact connected processes of othering that function at the individual level as well as part of national apparatuses, where we can observe the equivalent rituals of ‘taking out the trash’ occurring on a much larger scale. Here, the spatial division of waste is played out around accumulation and the question of who has the possibility or right to move and/or expand (themselves and/or their objects), and who instead must ‘stay’, and accumulate, or be the site of accumulation. Such process cannot but remind us of Rob Nixon’s definition of slow violence, a violence that not only ‘occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’ but that is also usually connected to dynamics of ‘displacement in place’ (Nixon 2011: 2). On a world scale, it is ultimately the question of modern (Western) nations dumping their ‘excess’ onto the ‘rest of the world’, while simultaneously othering the rest of the world as the ultimate excess, fleshed out in the disposability of lives and bodies, whether at home, or on the ultimate threshold of so-called migrant routes. Dumping trash, literally, ‘elsewhere’ that is not the family man’s home is thus a relentless act on the part of wealthier countries, whether it is legally or illegally carried out. Waste lines are in fact drawn between peoples, experiences, and narratives that are obliterated or over-written on one side, and comfortable, protected boundaries of ‘discrete’ national bodies on the other. These separating lines are drawn in space, reaching beyond the private/public divide, onto the demarcation of territories into sites of ‘growth’ and ‘advancement’ on one hand, and of disposal and accumulation on the other. From this perspective, the question that we face is perhaps not so much—or not only—what, indeed, is trash, but also, where is it?

The geographical emphasis of this volume is meant to engage with such questions. As pointed out by several recent publications regarding nature-culture relationships in Italy and some of the other Mediterranean countries, the long history of anthropic impact in this geo-cultural area provides a conspicuous series of case studies for those who want to explore the discursive and material relationships between human societies, accumulation, and disposal (cfr. Scapini and Ciampi 2010; McGregor 2015; Iovino 2016; Iovino et al. 2018; Benvegnù and Gilebbi 2022; Seger 2022). Moreover, the logic of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘purification’ we discussed above applies to all dividing lines, shifting in the face of narratives of ‘civilization’ and ‘civilizing missions’ at the heart of colonialism, as well as of racialized ‘imperial difference’, as theorized by Manfred Pfister (1996). Crucially, this logic has been historically exemplified, among other instances, by the Northern gaze on Southern Europe as filthy, ‘wild’, uncivilized, etc. (Cazzato 2017) and has returned stronger than ever in the contemporary tragedy of thousands of migrants who daily land dead—as indeed disposable, discarded corpses—on the shore of Southern European shores. This is the reason why Marco Armiero can ponder whether the ‘Mediterranean Sea nowadays’ should be considered as ‘the epitome of the Wasteocene, the conceptual and material border against which thousands of humans crash in their attempt to force the boundaries dividing those who value and those who are disposable’ (Armiero 2021: 12).

Our volume interrogates this logic as well as the systems and relationships for how waste comes to be, and aims to offer critical alternatives to popular and normative notions of waste by examining the cultural production connected to Italian and Mediterranean issues. Revolving around a critical framework that questions premises of what seems normal, given, or traditional, this volume analyzes the wider role that society and culture (in particular, the cultural production of literature, film, and theater) and their attendant social norms, economic systems, forms of labor, ideology, infrastructure, and power all play in defining, representing, and shaping attitudes and behaviors toward waste, as broadly defined. Waste as a concept and matter not only intersects with cultural, economic, environmental, and historical questions but also underwrites the power relations at play in the very formation of the (Western/Northern) worlding of the globe. Deeper dichotomies lie within the larger, totalizing structure of division between North and South (or between West and East, us and them) embedded in the hierarchical politics of colonialism. Such dichotomies include the crucial idea of uncleanliness (with all its implications and religious applications), and the contrasting concepts of purity and cleanliness. To discard something, furthermore, does not make it disappear; nothing disappears but is always there, somewhere else, never erased. Discarding thus returns the question of history as never really in the past, back there, but in fact here, present, and it asks what gets thrown out in narrating a history that can sustain political platforms: narratives of lands that could be exploited and then filled with waste once no longer colonized; the idea that entire peoples, if not also their lands, are or were expendable and could literally be disposed of; the convenient belief that throwing waste away somewhere (way South) makes it disappear; the opinion that people drowning in the Mediterranean are expendable. Our contributors thus seek to locate the lines separating and connecting colonialism, waste, pollution, discard, violence, and horrorism. In addition, we find particularly relevant to this volume the forms of ecology built around waste—in particular involving the Italian and other Mediterranean environments—that nonetheless resist and counter the principles and politics of dirt, rejection, and waste as oppositional terms to the sanctioned norm of Western/Northern cleanliness.

The articulation of waste and discard in theoretical reflections, militant and/or everyday practices, and literary and filmic representations allows for a conversation on the material and metaphorical elements of waste and discard, which, again following Susan Morrison, are fundamentally connected. The question, then, of the Mediterranean and the submerged/emerging ‘wasted lives’, of the waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and of landscape conservation and erasure, alongside literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness, or filmic narratives of the wasteocene, offer a contribution to a discourse that brings together the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean, as well as the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation and waste. The essays collected here attempt to read these terms and offer explorations into their complexities.

In the essay that opens the volume, Pasquale Verdicchio reflects on the complex relationships internal to the Mediterranean Wasteocene, focusing in particular on how migrant bodies are pushed, displaced, and often consumed by environmental stresses and anti-immigration policies. Verdicchio employs ecocriticism to scrutinize the hegemonic language that represents immigration as a waste management issue while exploring counter-narratives that are true to the struggle of forced environmental relocation. Verdicchio writes in search of words and stories able to convey the complexity and contingency of migration, particularly of the lives ‘wasted’ in the crossing of the Mediterranean.

Dialoguing with Verdicchio’s essay as well as with critical texts by Jane Bennett, Adriana Cavarero, Serenella Iovino, Achille Mbembe, and Rob Nixon, among others, Parati discusses the proximity and intimacy that connect flotsam as waste and flotsam as dead bodies in the Mediterranean. Her reading of the sea and the ‘waste’ in it highlights the ‘horrorism’ and the ‘slow violence’ that victimize the human and the inanimate, people and the environment. Yet, rejecting traditional dichotomies, Parati brings into the discussion the debate surrounding ethics of care vis-à-vis people and objects. In particular, she highlights things’ ‘material recalcitrance’ as object. Flotsam ends up meaning more than what human interpretation can assign to them. Parati observes that our focus and care must be placed on understanding and nurturing interconnectedness at those thresholds where the human meets the inhuman and, often, the inhumane.

One specific point of contact between humans and the ‘recalcitrance’ of waste is the focus of the following essay, in which Rebecca Falkoff discusses the 2017 relocation of an antique market in Florence, from its historical site in Piazza dei Ciompi to a nearby structure built specifically for hosting the market. The relocation was first justified by authorities due to the high levels of asbestos recorded in the original location, but, according to the majority of the local population and vendors, was also the result of political and commercial interests. Using the cultural history of the market and its relocation process as a case study, Falkoff engages with the broader histories of hazardous waste removal and how it has become a prominent factor in the social production of urban spaces.

Sophia Maxine Farmer continues this examination of spaces of conflict by entering the ongoing complex conversation about the sites of fascist material history (monuments, buildings, infrastructure, and land management projects) whose presence and function is still active today. She focuses in particular on the DUX forest on Monte Giano, the ‘Monument to the Italian Fallen Soldiers in Africa’ in Syracuse, and the Bolzano ‘Victory Monument’. Through the lenses of critical discard studies and material ecocriticism, Farmer’s essay aims to reframe the heated debate between conservationism and erasure, exploring alternative options, such as methods of non-ideological incorporation into the current Italian culture and landscape.