SubStance

Current headlines demonstrate that our widespread search for abundance has become a source of general concern. The press now abounds in debates about waste management, patterns of consumption and production, where these issues mainly articulate themselves in anecdotal or catastrophist modes. This collection breaks away from such approaches and shows that literature provides a precious insight into the underlying cultural, social and political mechanisms that shape attitudes to waste and abundance in Western Europe and North America. The collection conceptualizes the tensions between waste and abundance (as represented in literature), which are established as an entry-point into understanding the evolution of social and political structures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The aim of the volume is not to establish points of connection between ecology and literature, or to apply principles of sustainable development to literary analysis, or indeed to contest the marginal status of eco-criticism within current approaches to literature and the arts. On the contrary, the volume raises a number of ethical questions emerging from the centrality of waste and abundance to the workings of late capitalism. Particular attention is paid to the cultural and moral factors that condition our attitudes to waste and the ways in which literature addresses the problematic relationship that binds production, consumption and waste to social and political systems. The title of the collection reflects the central questions raised by all contributors: how are waste and abundance represented, how may we conceptualize these representations, and what ethical problems do they raise?

The collection relates to a research area currently developing in the Humanities, which calls for philosophical and historical approaches to questions of sustainable development and waste management. John Scanlan, for example, argues in his recent book On Garbage that processes of waste production are the shadowy double of civilization. However, this collection adopts a different perspective on the question of waste; it examines marginal as well as canonical types of literature to produce an [End Page 3] inclusive portrayal of the factors leading to excessive production and consumption. These are long-standing concerns in critical studies of modernism and postmodernism: Steven Connor’s Theory and Cultural Value, for instance, outlines broad patterns of interdependence between value and scarcity. In this collection, however, what is under scrutiny is the moment when the value of waste or rubbish is altered through the processes of writing, as well as through human interactions and the processes of subject formation.

What defines the innovative character of this volume is the persistence with which all contributors emphasize the ambivalent nature of waste—as both something and nothing. This ambivalence is here conceptualized in relation to the ability of waste to operate as something that can/cannot or should/should not be available for consumption. The theories under scrutiny include a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first century thinkers, particularly germane to provocative and creative readings in relation to these issues. The essays comment on the ability of waste to lead various types of existence, to inhabit social, moral and philosophical spheres simultaneously. In so doing, the volume distinguishes between different types of waste: waste to which a social or personal value can be ascribed, whose existence in time remains identifiable and quantifiable, and immeasurable waste, which can be understood in spatial terms but cannot be managed adequately. Immeasurable waste constitutes a problematic moral and ethical category, and the problems that it raises prevent its adequate management. By contrast, examining the relationship between waste and value opens up a fruitful line of enquiry for elucidating the connections between the subject and the expansion of a capitalist economy as well as the moral and ethical issues that condition subject formation.