Idea of Waste

John Scanlan is a cultural historian and analyst who works with In Certain Places, a public art project based at the University of Lancashire. His previous books include On Garbage (2005), Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar (2013) and Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself (2022), all published by Reaktion Books.

"In The Idea of Waste, John Scanlan has produced yet another valuable think piece about ‘what waste is and what it has been’. ‘It is about how we have lived with waste,’ he asserts, ‘made use of it as a thing or idea, and dreamt of escaping or conquering its negative effects once and for all.’ As usual, Scanlan offers a lot to chew on in this new book in a field that has seen amazing growth in recent years." - Martin V. Melosi, author of the award-winning Fresh Kills: A History of Consuming and Discarding in New York City"John Scanlan's new book reads like a historical and cultural anthropology of waste. It is an expansive excavation of the cultural middens – material, conceptual and virtual – of Western civilization. Drawing on works of politics, literature, industry, history, architecture and film, he reveals how waste occupies an ambiguous and shifting space between life (that which sustains, enriches and nourishes) and death (that which threatens, endangers or signifies disaster). Scanlan positions waste as central to our historical, cultural and existential fabric, taking us from the ancient sewers of Rome and medieval London, through Nadar’s documentation of Paris’s subterranean sewers to Walter Benjamin’s fascination with commodities and ruins, and from nuclear repositories and ecological wastelands to the digital detritus of our present moment." - Peter C. van Wyck, Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University, Montreal, and author of Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat

• Introduction:Waste Is Life Plus Minus1 Matter: Sewers, Filth and Sanitarians2 Objects: Consume, Accumulate, Destroy3 Resources: Reclaim, Recover, Recycle4 Aesthetics: Designing and Dematerializing5 Projections: Wastelands, Real and Imagined6 Temporalities: Deep, Infinite and MeaninglessConclusion: Data WastelandsReferences Select BibliographyAcknowledgementsPhoto Acknowledgements Index