What might a biopolitics of waste look like? Jussi Parrika notes the need for such a project in the introduction to Medianatures, writing: “We need to be looking at the intensity of the waste as living dead material–whereby ‘waste’ is not just waste but also a form of life, and thus is in need of its own biopolitics” (9). This call is in keeping with the rest of the introduction, framing as it does a set of orientations for the study of digital waste that would specifically attend to its “topological entanglement” within “layers of globalization” (4). What jumps out in this indication towards a biopolitics of waste is, immediately, the emphasis on life; not necropolitics but biopolitics, not dead media but zombie media (“living dead material”).
But biopolitics comes with its own set of investments. Chief among these is that of scale, or the vantage from which the biopolitical sees i.e. that of the population. We’ve engaged the divide between techniques of power that operate at the level of the individual vs. those that operate at the level of the population a few times in this class (e.g. with Andrejevic’s construction of so-called post-disciplinary, preemptive surveillance). The frictions of that debate are operational in the context of biopolitics as well. Thus: in a biopolitical, top-down view, would we inevitably have to consider the lives that are lived literally in and through waste (i.e. waste pickers whose livelihood draws on waste) as merely bare life? What would such a vision have us betray? I’m reminded here of anthropologist Bhrigupati Singh’s stellar Poverty and the Quest for Life: Spiritual and Material Striving in Rural India. Set in a community of bonded laborers in Rajasthan, India, Singh’s ethnography attempts a vocabulary of life that could exceed economists’ quantized notions of what constitutes quality of life. In milieus where bare life and abjection are the obvious concepts to reach for, what might be gained by trying instead to attain other points of view?
I’m also interested in what sort of models would best account for the incompleteness that seems an inherent feature of the politics of waste. By “incompleteness” I mean the ways in which the political measures meant to control it fall far short of the “precise controls and comprehensive regulations” that Foucault identified as a core feature of the techniques of biopolitics. The Basel Convention, for instance, continues not to be ratified by the U.S.; shipments of “all kinds of waste” continue to mysteriously appear on the shores of the global south. A good account of the topology of global waste would account for such instances not as irregularities but as features of the designed world of waste.
All of
this to say: yes, a biopolitics of waste. But also a micropolitics, an embedded
politics, and an immanent non-politics.
ReplyDeleteI think part of what you’re getting at here is also a form of virtualization. E-waste is clearly a critical issue in its own right, but there is an increasingly important emergent form of visibility characterized by “credits.” I think this is related to financialization and the virtualization of financial instruments, which clearly has a long history. But now credits not only link policy goals and capital but circulate in their own marketplaces, accruing their own particular values as commodities. There are the electric vehicle credits that Tesla has become adept (relatively speaking) at securing and reselling. And then there are quotas and credits related to electronic waste disposal that circulate as their own commodities in international markets, becoming the visible surface of a phenomenon that relies on the invisibility of certain places (like these semi-undocumented waste sites in Pakistan). Of course, to talk even provisionally about this “visibility” or “invisibility” brings us into the top-down and increasingly global way of looking and knowing that you point to here, exploring the biopolitical. At a local level these waste sites are not only visible but perhaps unavoidable. But the local may be the thing systematically invisibilized by the credit. There is also, clearly, a criminal side to this: a black market in waste, but this seems almost incidental given the scale of the crimes committed visibly and guarded by the language of the free market when it comes to waste and pollution.
non-core post 9/10