File(s) under permanent embargo
The anatomy of a dumpster: abject capital and the looking glass of value
This essay explores the cultural economy of commercial waste. Drawing from ethnographic research with Dumpster divers in Seattle, Washington, and other cities with comparable waste streams, it explores the ways in which waste may constitute a distinct cultural-economic logic with the capacity to produce value. In particular, I argue that massive quantities of unspoiled food and other discarded commercial goods with persistent use values constitute a kind of abject capital, the economic significance of which is precisely that it is removed from circulation. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s description of the nature of political exclusion, and Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection, I locate this abject capital at the intersection of cultural logics of capitalist exchange and consumer aesthetics. Quarantined in exceptional spaces like the retail or wholesale Dumpster, its economic and cultural value is paradoxically evacuated and preserved in the imprint of its absence from the market and as such is conferred upon those goods remaining upon the shelves. Exception and abjection, therefore, respectively describe the biopolitical and affective dimensions of waste and the preconditions of commodity exchange. I conclude that abject capital may thereby constitute both a functional boundary to capital and a threshold for the inception of those forms of life, such as Dumpster diving and squatting, that are anathema to the dominant market calculus.
History
Journal
Social textVolume
32Issue
1 118Season
Spring 2014Pagination
93 - 113Publisher
Duke University PressLocation
Durham, N.C.Publisher DOI
ISSN
0164-2472eISSN
1527-1951Language
engPublication classification
C Journal article; C1.1 Refereed article in a scholarly journalCopyright notice
2014, Duke University PressUsage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedLicence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC