The Things We Leave Behind: Rethinking posthumanism through the lens of waste by Trishala Dutta

In her book No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh writes: “I want to be responsible to and for my body, for everything that it yields” (Singh, 2018, 46). Succeeding this mode of articulation, I commit this essay to think about the human body- constituting flesh and mind- performing a visceral, affective, chemical, biologic, and sensorial activity that gives emergence to the idea of a self and connects it to multiple histories. This paper rests on the idea of re-experiencing the body sensorium by drawing focus on the things that leave it. It meditates over this primary relationship of the body and its inextricable bounds to other bodies by refiguring what is marginal to it: its discards. By paying attention to the way that our bodies open up and let go, we come closer to understanding the connection between the body and the others. It helps us understand that the body and its products are imbricated in a radical network or entanglements with human and non-human actors. An engagement with excretion and the waste that our human bodies produce is a way of knowing the self through abiding by that which extends the self.

Viki Squire notes that ‘the human’ is a political stake produced through struggles to de/value people, places, and things, and that is thus subject to contestation as well as to processes of de- and re-composition (Squire, 2014, 11). The multiple ways in which “‘the human’  is made, unmade, and remade” (Squire, 2014, 12) concern the hierarchies created between people. Through my engagement with waste, I insist on ascribing meaning to think about how we produce, discard, and at whose expense while questioning the radical porosity of our being and our entanglement with the environment and others. Is it possible to reimagine intimacy with others through the body and its discards? I have also structured my study of the experience of our excrements as not only an analytical framework for working through questions of identity, embodiment, relationships, and social inclusion/exclusion but also as a practice in accountability.  Only by rooting theories of waste in these contexts can we expect to gain a deeper understanding  and reimagine the relationship between humans and the waste they produce.

Francesca Ferrando speaks of how it is necessary for any kind of political work in the 21st century to take into account a post-humanist and post-anthropocentric approach to address the topic of justice in a comprehensive and fulfilling way (Ferrando, 2017). The posthuman turn marks the shift away from the notion that the human is an isolated, individualistic being into the veracity that all our actions have a direct impact on others. Ferrando states that we take the notion of the human being for granted, but historically not every human being has been treated like a human (Ferrando, 2017). Human identity hinges on the notion of the Other. The self defines itself in relation to the Other, through a mode of separation. So, what does it mean to think of these porous boundaries that connect us to the other? That we are inextricably bound to one another. Dwelling upon our excrement rejects the idea of being fully contained subjects and seeks to create “an inventory of traces” through an actual turn to embodiment and thinking more palpably about the traces left in us by other bodies, human and non-human, that we are constantly exchanging matter with. Susan Kozel writes:

a body is not a fixed thing. It is not an isolated thing. It is mutable. It extends to include organic and inorganic intensities. It is fundamentally in a state of exchange, negotiation, or reconfiguration. It exists in a state of potential. (Kozel, 2017)

Nancy Tuana calls into question “the boundaries between our flesh and the flesh of the world” (Singh, 2018a, 30). Tuana’s understanding of viscous porosity addresses the paradoxical nature of bodies and the bodily, as at once viscous, implying states of wanted or unwanted interconnectedness and interdependence, and porous, enabling fluidity in transactions (Tuana, 2008, 189). Articulations on viscosity have expanded towards the focus on contiguity between humans and the environment as a means of reconfiguring what can be problematically understood as single coherent entities, social or otherwise – for instance, the notion of a ‘Body’ (singular, whole) (Wagner, 2018). Thinking through the body’s disposable productions becomes a recuperative task- to think that the waste we produce might have value and communicate something beyond humiliation and abjection. It evokes the radical potential of the body. Such a reading invites a shift away from the autonomous, individualized, and discrete understandings of Western thought and instead insists on moving beyond the anthropocentric, that allow us to think about human and non-human bodies and worlds together. Through contemplation of waste, we are made to think about a radical relationality, which insists that the private is intimately tied to the public. It disrupts the norms of what should and should not be talked about and instead draws the regulatory gaze to these private bodily experiences. It exposes the Western fantasy and fiction of a unified body and instead draws attention to a body that fails, lacks control, falls ill, excretes, sweats, reproduces, and the intersubjective relational contexts of these acts.

 The waste produced by the individual body relates to a larger culture of consumption in relation to landfills and garbage. By taking an account of the waste that we produce, we learn of ourselves as products and participants in systems of imperial capitalism . By thinking about waste, we can also begin to think about the ways in which different social groups experience it based on their powers, strategies, and constraints. Those who are closely affiliated with waste are often seen to be linked to physical and social precariousness and degrading living conditions. Reading into this concern can allow us to understand waste as carriers of cultural significance in the everyday lives of those affiliated with it: garbage pickers, sanitation workers, manual scavengers, animals. Those who live among the disposable themselves become dispossessed. This excremental language is also administered to refer to the relation between those belonging to different castes; that the caste system grounds itself on this scheme of sanitation. Waste here becomes a metaphor for Otherness. It stands for the precarity of the surplus populations who are considered to be disposable to capitalism. Michelle Yates argues that capitalism, “in its reduction of labor to a factor of production, speaks to a logic of human disposability” (Yates, 2011, 1680).

On the one hand, the body of the laborer is used up or wasted at accelerated rates so as to secure the most profit. On the other hand, the exigencies of capitalist profit-making may lead to this factor of production being excreted (as a form of waste) into unemployment or underemployment, creating surplus populations that are separated partially or fully from domains of capitalist exchange and social life. (Yates, 2011, 1679)

Working with waste is not considered to be productive labor either. This cultural politics of waste also lays bare a “politics of disposability” (Giroux, 20116). Henry Giroux identifies such a politics wherein he argues that those who do not produce labor that is beneficial to capitalism, are considered useless and therefore, disposable (Giroux, 2006). Giroux notes that “entire populations marginalized by race and class are now considered redundant, an unnecessary burden on state coffers and consigned to fend for themselves” (Giroux, 2006, 174). Giroux goes on to quote Angela Davis who insists that such disposability politics “are very clear signs of. . . impending fascist policies and practices,” which not only construct an imaginary social environment for all of those populations rendered disposable but also exemplify a site and space “where democracy has lost its claims” (qtd. In Giroux, 2006, 174).

This idea that takes on a cultural language is where my own interest lies. It insists on making bodily waste out of the space of the intimate and making it the focus of collective conversations. It becomes part of a script that is collective and historical, drawing on a long and varied history of violence and dehumanization of people belonging to the lower castes in India. Although anthropologists have tried to write about the waste that India produces, and the process of managing it undertakes, it often fails to account for the ideas of who produce waste, who have the privilege of removing themselves from the waste that they produce, and who ultimately live and deal with waste, all manifestations of caste. The ubiquity of the caste system remains such that it is difficult to think about any constitutive practice to exist untouched by the vileness of Brahmanism. In India, amidst a deeply stratified society, people themselves take on the form of waste, there is a strong bond between caste and waste management, as the idea of purity and pollution heavily influences things like waste management. Dalit bodies are lined up with pollution, but savarna bodies become characterized as the embodiment of purity. Waste becomes a site of contestation, of oppression, of fragmentation, and then resistance, which demonstrates their relationship with the oppressive structures of Brahmanism. In India, there is an average of one manual scavenger, belonging to the Dalit community, dying every five days after they dive into a septic tank or sewage system. Keeping cities clean is part of the job of sanitation workers, alongside health workers, in the war against diseases. However, their engagement in such dehumanizing labor in toxic work conditions, which expose them to various lethal substances and gases emitted puts them at the risk of several fatal diseases. In the current context, despite their vital role in fighting the pandemic, sanitation workers are not covered by labor policies or welfare programs^[1].

Such rhetoric also summons colonial histories, transnational displacement, and racial unbelongings while calling up the strange and estranging afterlife of human-made matter (Singh, 2018, 48), wherein crusades against filth became the imperialist agenda. This vocabulary of filth and unsanitary practices and disgust is still employed in current days as racial and anti-immigration rhetoric against humans whom the empire considers to be  “societal excrement” (Esty, 1999, 30). The fear of immigration is justified through the empire’s disdain for excess and disproportion. It stems from the need to control boundaries and bodies, and the body’s boundaries. The exits and entries of the body and the things that leave it or enter it, as the nation’s, become potential sites of conflict and control. Correspondingly, the colonial force saw the bodies of the colonized as polluted and in need of control and the colonial space as a “human-waste land” (Anderson, 1995, 641) that needed immediate control and reformation. Human waste was considered a rich source of pathology and used to mark social and racial boundaries. As Anderson notes, the American bodily control legitimized and symbolized social and political control, which attempted to control the “promiscuous defecation” (Anderson, 1995,  642) which transgressed the colonial boundaries (643). They believed that this transgression by the “grotesque, defecating Filipino” (Anderson 1995, 647) body endangered the lives of the Americans, almost as if tainting their pristine whiteness. This act of somatic disciplining and regulating excretory practices becomes an aim of the colonial project and its developmental agenda. Joshua D. Esty writes:

 If natives are coded in excremental terms and are taken as embodiments of the colony’s unmodernized, unassimilated material, then they persist as a living threat to the hygienic symbolic order of the empire. (Esty, 1999, 29).

 In this  I will begin by arguing that the crisis of waste is a crisis of borders. These borders and boundaries seek to generate differences between ‘us’/‘them’, ‘human’/non/less-than human’. I borrow this idea from Vicki Squire who understands waste as a border concept. She writes that waste seeks to destabilize the relations between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and both evoke affective anxieties and moral reflections on how to live.  That waste can be understood in the context of modernity both as an invention to produce the order as well as an element that is destabilizing the modern order, the international system, and the sovereign subject that it invokes (Squire, 2014, 15).

I want to go on further and practice an ethic of hope. Eve Kosofsky, Sedgwick wrote in Tendencies:

“The ability to attach intensively to a few cultural objects, … or objects whose meaning seemed mysterious, excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available to us, became a prime resource for survival. We needed there to be sites where the meaning didn’t line up tidily with each other, and we learned to invest those sites with fascination and love.” ( Sedgwick, 1994, 3.)

We could perhaps revisit waste as such a site. Our excrement becomes the product of our activism: it bears the stories of our activities, our being, and becoming, but also remains marked by abstraction. Thinking through the body’s disposable productions becomes a recuperative task- to think that the waste we produce might have value and communicate something beyond humiliation, abjection, and abstraction. Perhaps, to address the oppressive structures that our wastes become a part of and how it affects those beyond us, we could start thinking of the human need to dispose of, purge, and distance itself from the waste that it produces. Maybe addressing this desperate need to defamiliarize ourselves and destroy an affiliation with the parts of ourselves that we are uncomfortable with can drive us toward a deeper connection with those human/non-human actors that dwell in our disgust and differences. Such an idea is not an act that we are unfamiliar with. We have always been capable of intimation with the repressed and uncontrollable corporeality of the body, be it our own or others. Humans have always sought intimacy through accession to each other’s orifices and what leaves it. I am reminded of my mother cleaning up after me, my father cleaning up after my dog, me cleaning up after my partner, with no hint of disgust, no urgency to purge, engaged in a radical act of kindness and care. Perhaps, we can engage with excreta and waste as a means to an endless possibility: it is not simply an internal matter but something that transgresses the norms of the dominant world, a site for alterity that enables a collaborative imagination. Articulating such ideas could eventually bring us closer to those who deal with our waste for us, driving us to take an account of other bodies because they are so intimately tied to us. Our radical porosity and entanglement with the environment and with each other avow that the things we leave behind and the things that leave us have the potential to reimagine human/non-human relations and regenerate into the narrative of our being, because as Singh believes “our excesses are everywhere and are telling our stories” (Singh, 2018b, 52).

WORKS CITED

Anderson, W. (1995). Excremental Colonialism: Public Health and the Poetics of Pollution. Critical Inquiry, [online] 21(3), pp.640–669. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343940?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents

Butler, J. (2006). Precarious life : the powers of mourning and violence. London: Verso.

Ferrando, F. (2017, December 8). Posthuman Politics and Global Justice [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-4MtH4CWc

Giroux, H. (2006). Violence, Katrina, and the Biopolitics of Disposability. College Literature

Grosz, E. (2011). Volatile bodies toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington [U.A.] Indiana Univ. Press

Kozel, S. (2017). The Archival Body: Re-enactments, affective doubling and surrogacy. Medium. https://medium.com/the-new-human/the-archival-body-re-enactments-affective-doubling-and-surrogacy-448815d62c07

Singh, J. (2018). Disposable Objects: Ethecology, Waste, and Maternal Afterlives. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 19(1), pp.48–54.

Singh, J. (2018). No Archive Will Restore You. Santa Barbara, Ca: 3Ecologies Books/Immediations, An Imprint Of Punctum Books.

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Squire, V. (2014). Desert ‘trash’: Posthumanism, border struggles, and humanitarian politics. Political Geography, 29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.12.003

Tuana, N. (2008). Viscous porosity: Witnessing Katrina. In: S. Alaimo & S. J. Hekman, eds., Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp.323–333.

Wagner, L. B. (2018) New Materialism. [online] https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/v/viscosity.html

Yates, M. (2011). The Human-As-Waste, the Labor Theory of Value and Disposability in Contemporary Capitalism. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00900.x

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^[1] See Salve, P. & Jungari, S (2020) Sanitation workers at the frontline: work and vulnerability in response to COVID-19, Local Environment, 25:8, 627-630, DOI: 10.1080/13549839.2020.1792430