The Future of Post-human Waste: Towards a New Theory of Uselessness and Usefulness

Is waste (or trash) really so useless that, as William Faulkner once wrote, [r]ead everything trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. . . . If it is good, you ll find out. If it s not, throw it out the window ? (TE 2012) Interestingly, this critical view of waste (or trash) can be contrasted with an opposing observation by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who once famously said that the waste basket is the writer s best friend. (TE 2012a) Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), waste, in relation to both uselessness and usefulness is neither possible or impossible, nor desirable or undesirable to the extent that the respective ideologues on different sides would like us to believe. Of course, this challenge to the opposing views of waste does not imply that waste has no practical value, or that those interdisciplinary fields (related to waste) like epidemiology, global warming, waste management, low-carbon economics, ethical consumerism, resource recovery, freeganism, environmental justice, space debris, and so on are unimportant. Of course, neither of these extreme views is reasonable. Rather, this book offers an alternative, better way to understand the future of waste, especially in the dialectic context of uselessness and usefulness while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them or integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other. More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the transfigurative theory of waste) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way. If successful, this seminal project is to fundamentally change the way that we think about waste in relation to uselessness and usefulness from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what the author originally called its post-human fate.