Resource Systems, the Paradigm of Zero-Waste, and the Desire for Sustenance

Amanda Boetzkes (bio)
University of Guelph

Abstract

This essay argues that efforts to recuperate the ecological damage of industrial waste as a profitable resource obscure the broader procedures by which human bodies, substances, energies, and desires are also yielded as resources in an economic model of indefinite expansion. The “cradle-to-cradle” proposition for a zero-waste society thus corresponds with the expanding scope and complex operations by which lives are deprived of plenitude and starved of excess, so that suffering and need become potential resources themselves. Through the artworks of Thomas Hirschhorn, Melanie Bonajo, and Tara Donovan, this essay shows that the ideal of zero-waste conceals the wasting of human and ecological life on which the economy is predicated.

What counts as a natural resource is now indistinguishable from its deployment and distribution through global systemic procedures that are economically, aesthetically, and ecologically charged. It seems no substance, object, energy, or territory is exempt from being evaluated for its potential use and exchangeability for economic growth. Thus land, water, oil, plastics, and profit achieve a kind of equivalence as resources proper. Even waste is recuperated for its potential resourcefulness, so that the concept of a “resource” subscribes to a paradigm and ideal of “zero-waste.” Waste contravenes both a capitalist prohibition against energy expenditures that do not lead to profit, and an ecological imperative for resource conservation. What defines a resource, then—with its accompanying technologies of extraction, its forms of exchange, distribution, and social values (“resourcefulness”)—is borne out first through the triangulation of a restricted global energy economy (a system that relies on corporeal deprivation and suffering), and second, through a correlate ecological crisis defined precisely through the foreclosure of biodiversity. Resource systems gather the dissociated vectors of industrial exploitation, the penury of capitalism, bodily depletion, and ecological consequences of an economic system that refuses to engage complex strategies for wasting.

The notion of resource has developed into a global armature by which substances, bodies, and energies are absorbed into a broader techno-corporeal machine that precludes physical sustenance, and destines the planet to ecological collapse. This essay examines how industrial waste has been considered a resource in its own right, and how the resourcing of waste ultimately renders invisible the forms of labor, energy expenditure, and ecological consequences on which the global resource system relies. Such a predicament is particularly evident in the “cradle-to-cradle” model of production that takes its foundational principles from industrial design. First proposed in 2002 by chemist Michael Braungart and architect William McDonough, cradle-to-cradle was an approach to design practice by which industrial and commodity production would be chemically altered but also stewarded through the economy in such a way as to maximize material reutilization to a point of zero-waste. It distinguished itself from what it called the “cradle-to-grave” model, which assumes that materials are simply used to the point of exhaustion, and products retired into landfills or other forms of waste dumping. However, in order to achieve the zero-waste ideal, the authors would rely on an alternate model of economy according to which companies take financial responsibility for the distribution, return, and upcycling of their production. The model aspires to eliminate waste by turning it into a resource economy. Thus cradle-to-cradle is not merely a recycling system; its functioning requires an alternate infrastructure of bi-directional exchange. The question is whether this alternative could be compatible and coextensive with the prevailing global economy.

The drawback of cultural ideals of eliminating waste and their relationship to the prevailing resource paradigm comes into view when works of contemporary art visualize a process of machinic heterogenesis by which bodies, energies, substances, and desires are absorbed into a manifold autopoietic system in which industrial waste is absorbed for profit. I discuss the way art relies on energy slaves, and on physical desire, deprivation, and ecological damage by examining three works of contemporary art that visualize this autopoietic system and its effects: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake (2000), which foregrounds the restrictions of the resource economy and its reliance on bodily deprivation; Melanie Bonajo’s After Life Against the World (2012), which shows the stultified desire to free the body from its imbrication in the waste-resource complex; and Tara Donovan’s Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006–2015), which generates a future ecological perspective on the resource-waste predicament. Taken together, these three works expose the paradoxical aesthetic of the current resource paradigm, in which the ideals of a wasteless society are hinged to corporeal and environmental systems that are always already wasted. They visualize the dilemmas of such systemic closure, and the extent to which the ideology of zero-waste is tied not only to the deferral or prevention of bio-corporeal nourishment, but to broader notions of systemic impoverishment as well.

Technical Nutrients and Zero Waste

North American postminimalist artists of the late 1960s and ’70s made visible the connection between waste production and industrial resource extraction. Robert Smithson, Richard Serra, and Robert Morris used industrial waste materials such as ore, slag, and textile remains, among other forms of debris, to create sculptures that succumbed to a state of deformation. The postminimalist aesthetic foregrounded the material excesses of the industrial cycle that would persist across time. Smithson in particular situated art in lifeless postindustrial landscapes, so that he could imagine a time in which all matter had reached an entropic endgame. His work Spiral Jetty (1970), for example, was installed in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, not far from an abandoned oil drilling complex. The landscape was otherwise desolate. Smithson documented the construction of the sculpture as a kind of formation in reverse, whereby a dump truck deposited basalt rock into the lake to build up the 1500-foot spiral armature of the sculpture, but the sculpture was nevertheless destined to be abandoned to the rising and falling water levels of the lake. In these future wastelands, the return to form and the structural integrity of the artwork were impossibilities. Industrial production led to the irreversible wasting of matter.

The postminimalist vision of modern industry was clear: resource-based economies were bound to particular forms of surplus materials—wastes—that sediment and cannot return into the economic cycle of production, exchange for profit, and consumption. Yet recent decades have seen a preoccupation with the return of waste into the economy, particularly in efforts to reincorporate it through the “Four Rs’” (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Regulate). The rise of the discourse of eco-efficiency in the 1980s saw efforts on the part of individuals, municipalities, and industries to take responsibility for the waste they produce and to come up with strategies for sustainable waste disposal or reintegration into economic circulation. Cultural theorist Gay Hawkins astutely summarizes this predicament in her Deleuzian reading of contemporary waste management. In the past, she explains, garbage was handled through practices of elimination and expulsion, that could be understood as spatial acts of passing from one side of a boundary to another in ways that produce and perpetuate the cleanliness and order of the subject (whether through an elimination from the individual sphere or through practices in which it passes from within social circulation to an exterior cursed zone, as per Mary Douglas’s insightful hypothesis in Purity and Danger [1966]). The elimination model reached its apex in the postwar era with the rise of disposability culture, when commodities were produced with a view to quick and easy discard. Hawkins argues, however, that disposability as such is a technical and spatial fantasy; not only is the prospect of waste disappearing a logical impossibility, but waste is also increasingly visible, “a landscape in its own right” (Hawkins 10). The politicization of environmental responsibility charges waste with a new moral valence, whereby waste is never simply eliminated but rather enters into a reorganized set of relations in connection with the subject, and with social space more broadly. The question remains, however, what kinds of forces generate the desire and will to preserve waste within social circulation. How do these desires relate to global patterns of waste handling?

Michael Braungart—renowned chemist, founder of the EPEA (Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency), and former Greenpeace activist—suggests that the efforts of industries to implement the Four Rs have proved misguided from the start. In Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, Braungart and his co-author, architect William McDonough, propose a major overhaul of the systemic relationship between resources and consumer products. The book outlines a biomimetic model of resource circulation. The authors wage substantive critiques of sustainability, among them the fact that most efforts to recycle have actually led to a downcycling of materials, by which they lose both use value and exchange value. The downcycling of materials such as plastics, metals, and chemicals can increase environmental contamination because of the widening dissemination of downgraded materials. The continual circulation and redistribution of industrial wastes in a closed system means that not only has Smithson’s vision of a postindustrial landscape slowly succumbing to the pull of entropic disorder been reified, but this landscape is not a discrete space and time outside of human history. Rather, it is an integral part of the world because it has been incorporated into the very processes of economic development. The systemic closure of recycling leads to a paradoxical condition in which production, consumption, and wasting are integrated processes that deplete planetary resources. The culture of sustainability has distributed the planet’s resourcefulness in such a way that it has become a self-exhausting system, both economically and ecologically.

Braungart and McDonough’s treatise on waste is exemplary in that it proposes a new model of economy in order to grapple with industrial waste. Ultimately, however, it generates a lacuna insofar as it relies on industrial design (technological innovation) to take strides towards ecosystemic balance, and an elaborate management system to organize the distribution, tracking, and replacement of commodities. In the midst of these overlapping systems—a designer economy and an ecology of waste—there is little understanding of the energies that drive and perpetuate economies and how these are connected to ecological imbalances. This oversight perpetuates forms of invisibility as the historical paradigm of resource-harvesting transforms into a global system of waste circulation. It is therefore worthwhile to see how such invisibilities occur, and what they obscure.

Braungart and McDonough’s “cradle-to-cradle” model of resource use relies on a principle of circulating “nutrients” rather than matter per se. The authors suggest that since the Industrial Revolution, the resource industry has developed two metabolic systems: the biosphere and the “technosphere.” The biosphere, a familiar concept in the life sciences, functions on a principle of zero-waste, which is to say that in nature all spoilage turns into primary nutrients—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen—that are reabsorbed by the soil and its microorganisms and therefore generate growth and diversity. By contrast, the processes of extracting, altering, or synthesizing substances from the Earth’s crust generate new material flows of industrial mass that are toxic to the soil and cannot be broken down. In fact, these new materials were designed for ever-greater flexibility and durability in some cases, and built-in obsolescence in others (though only with a view to diminishing use value, not to proper biodegradation). Braungart and McDonough offer the designation “technosphere” for the circulatory system of these new flows, and characterize its metabolic system as “cradle-to-grave” to signal the uni-directionality of these new substances. The authors identify the conflation of technical and biological materials in the manufacture of consumer products as the fundamental problem of the emergence of the technosphere. They argue that the reason for increased pollution and amassment of waste is the production of “monstrous hybrid” products that cannot be salvaged, separated and properly recycled into their respective systems. They take the example of the conventional leather shoe; where at one time leather shoes were tanned with vegetable chemicals that would biodegrade, in the past half-century vegetable tanning has given way to tanning with chromium, a toxic chemical that is cheaper to produce but often harmful to workers exposed to it during manufacture and to the environments in which the manufacturing wastes are dumped. After the shoe has finished its life, it is returned to a landfill in which both its biological and technical materials are lost. In a similar vein, conventional rubber-sole shoes contaminate the atmosphere and soil with lead and plastics as they start to wear down and leave particles in their wake (Braungart and McDonough 99).

Braungart and McDonough’s main argument concerns the production of waste, but they do not condemn consumption as its primary cause. They posit that while the confusion of flows between the biosphere and the technosphere is the core problem that generates waste (and multiple forms of environmental toxicity), waste can be rethought in terms of biological and chemical nutrients. Thus, the tragedy of waste is not that it is inherently contaminating, but rather that its nutrients have not been recovered in their respective spheres. The authors propose a biomimetic system of industrial design in which organized nutrient recovery replaces waste:

To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things—products, packaging, and systems—from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist. It means that the valuable nutrients contained in the materials shape and determine the design: form follows evolution, not just function. … With the right design, all the products and materials manufactured by industry will safely feed these two metabolisms, providing nourishment for something new. … Products can be composed either of materials that biodegrade and become food for biological cycles, or of technical materials that stay in closed-loop technical cycles, in which they continually circulate as valuable nutrients for industry. (Braungart and McDonough 104)

The book offers a number of solutions to the cradle-to-grave problem of waste, such as new chemical designs that respect the biosphere/technosphere distinction (such as nutritious biological textiles, or a synthetic commercial carpeting with a durable bottom and detachable top that could be upcycled for its technical nutrients). The book itself is printed on a prototype for a synthetic plastic paper that is waterproof, durable, and can be recycled into technical nutrients. More than offering design solutions, however, it advances an economic foundation for the zero-waste model. The book’s technosphere designs require a new exchange infrastructure by which technical nutrients could be recovered and upcycled. For example, in order for the cycles of the technosphere to succeed, a “product of service” concept would have to be implemented. Instead of products being bought, owned, and disposed of by consumers, technically nutritious products (such as cars, televisions, carpets, computers, and refrigerators) would be reconceived as services rented for a defined user period (Braungart and McDonough 111):

Under this scenario, people could indulge their hunger for new products as often as they wish, and industry could encourage them to do so with impunity, knowing that both sides are supporting the technical metabolism in the process. Automobile manufacturers would want people to turn in their old cars in order to regain valuable industrial nutrients. Instead of waving industrial resources goodbye as the customer drives off in a new car, never to enter the dealership again, automobile companies could develop lasting and valuable relationships that enhance customers’ quality of life for many decades and that continually enrich the industry itself with industrial “food.” (Braungart and McDonough 114)

Herein lies the dilemma of waste and its relationship to the resource paradigm. The authors cannot conceive of the technosphere’s metabolism without also invoking a major economic reconfiguration from a product-consumer-based exchange to a highly regulated economy of temporary use and recovery, in which the use of objects is nested within limited exchange contracts. Industry itself would be geared not towards extraction and manufacture but towards nutrient management. In other words, to advocate for a cradle-to-cradle metabolic system, the authors undertake a shift in voice from a practical account of the capacities of postindustrial design to a utopian vision of an economy based on nourishment and richness, that is enabled by its overcoming of the exchange for profit model. It is utopian rather than practical insofar as it accounts neither for the primacy of profit accumulation as an existing condition of the prevailing economic metabolism, nor for the fact that the disruptive movement of energy from human systems to ecological systems is fundamental and cannot be resolved technologically. The cradle-to-cradle model risks becoming an impossible fantasy of a middle ground between the desire for the accumulation of resources and an endless supply of nutrients.

The Northern Chinese village of Huangbaiyu in Benxi Province makes a curious case in point. In partnership with Deng Nan, the daughter of former Chinese statesman Deng Xiaoping, William McDonough’s architectural firm was commissioned to implement the principles and designs of cradle-to-cradle and transform Huangbaiyu from an agriculture-reliant village into an eco-village. The village was organized to be a model for the Chinese government’s more ambitious goal of centralizing rural communities, seizing farmland, and moving over half of its 800 million peasants to the cities (Toy). The firm planned to relocate disparate farm plots to a central area, where homes would be built of straw and pressed earth, and rigged with solar panels and other energy conversion technologies. The local residents were encouraged to exchange their current homes and land for one of the centralized eco-houses. The land could therefore be consolidated for more efficient yields and farming development. In lieu of tinder or bottled gas, residents would use biogas provided by a biogasification plant owned by the village chief, Dai Xiaolong. By 2006, forty-two of the planned two hundred houses had been built, but none were occupied, despite government pressures on locals. Furthermore, the eco-village functioned primarily as a private enterprise, having been funded mainly by the village chief, with only a fraction of the endeavor supported by the Chinese government. Not only were residents of the village unable to afford the cost of the eco-village housing, but they saw no practical benefits to changing their livelihood in agriculture for a centralized eco-communal lifestyle (Toy).

McDonough’s experimental village demonstrates the way that the techno-utopianism of a zero-waste ecological model works at cross-purposes with historical forms of sustainability (such as decentralized rural agriculture) even though it attempts to lower the cost of energy. In effect, Huangbaiyu remained a stalemated project because it could not intervene into the prevailing assemblage of labor, or yield an investment of human life to animate it or support its functioning. Moreover, the resistance on part of the inhabitants was due in no small part to the fact that the eco-village would have deprived each of them of land and individual sustenance, not to mention cost them all their savings or put them into debt. Thus, Huangbaiyu became a zero-sum game for those who would opt into it, much as it was a zero-waste city. In this sense, the energy and maintenance costs of such a system remain unaccounted for, as do its claims to genuine sustainability.

Machinic Heterogenesis of the Global Waste System

If waste is incorporated into global systems of economic circulation, and if efforts to re-pattern those systems to contain or eliminate both biological and industrial wastes are thwarted because they cannot channel the invisible energies that power economic growth, then the question arises, what is the source of these energies? How can the economy’s energies be understood in relation to systemic imbalances, particularly in their depletion of human bodies for the expansion and growth of the global capital? To answer these questions, we can consider contemporary art’s preoccupation with waste and forms of energy depletion and expenditure. Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake is a poignant example of a global economy that is at once a wastescape and a restricted system that thrives on human deprivation. The installation visualizes a deprived and suffering human population bound up in a paradoxical resource economy that prohibits waste while wasting itself through the cycle of diminishing returns of material wealth. Moreover, Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake conveys this corporeal condition precisely through the use of complex industrial materials. The construction orbits around a “world cake” set on a wood plank frame and covered with media images taped to cardboard frames depicting global resources (food, water, and energy) and the multitudes of people who depend on them. Each slice is wrapped tightly in colored plastic and weighted down by chains of buckets that are poised to catch every last crumb—an astute depiction of how an excessive figure such as a luxurious cake can be inverted to become an image of penury. The big cake is a figuration of wealth, but it is also a limited resource from which everyone must draw to survive. Books about global resources and the world’s destitute are chained to the central armature so that titles spring forward from a tangle of images and materials: The Economics of the Labor Market; Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine; The African Poor: A History; Your Money or Your Life! The Tyranny of Global Finance; The Rwanda Crisis: A History of Genocide. In addition, four monitors sit on top of the cake, airing documentary footage of war, food, cooking, and labor.

Fig. 1
Thomas Hirschhorn, Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, 2000. Copyright Thomas Hirschhorn. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London.

Spreading foil appendages attach the cake to twelve altars, each featuring a novelty spoon made of foil and dedicated to a “failed utopia”: Mies van der Rohe, the 1937 Nazi Degenerate Art Show, Malevich, Rosa Luxembourg, guns, fashion, the moon, Rolex Swiss watches, the Chicago Bulls, Nietzsche, a city (Venice), and a country (China). Like the big cake, these altars feature information, images, and literature that articulate the global vision of each utopia. The spoons appear to be dipped in blood, which pools at the bottom of each altar. All the information and attention devoted to the utopia is therefore haunted by the struggle to fulfill hunger. As Hirschhorn puts it: “I want to make a new work about the world condition, the World State. The World State is about the need to eat or the possibility of not eating. The World State is unjust, inconvenient, confused, fucked-up, shitty. Everyone has to eat.” Evidently, the impoverished state of the world’s people underwrites what Hirschhorn calls the “World State.” For all of the plenitude of each altar—its array of substances, information, and affectively-charged images—a subtext of desperation and human suffering underwrites the utopia.

Many critics have been interested in Hirschhorn’s capacity to visualize the scope and history of modern globalization. Benjamin Buchloh praises Hirschhorn’s pavilions, altars, constructions, and monuments for their alternative spatial demarcations that integrate themselves and thus mimetically follow the systems of global exchange. Hirschhorn’s impoverished materials, which make his works look like an “amateurish bricolage,” are negative ready-mades—the containers and wrapping materials in which objects have been packed, shipped, and distributed (Buchloh 47). They are composed of the traces of the global system of production posited as waste. In other words, Hirschhorn represents global capitalism in an excremental phase, precisely as a waste system, or rather as a system in the process of wasting itself. Waste here is not a homogenous base matter sedimented at the endpoint of industrial processing as it is in Robert Smithson’s earthworks and non-sites. There is no transgressive waste to throw a wrench in the works of a cultural superstructure. There is no possibility to be jarred out of the symbolic system of representation that preserves and supports the economy. Instead, the installation is interpenetrated by flexible and enduring substances that appear as disposed materials but nevertheless permeate the channels of global exchange: aluminum, nylon, adhesives, plastics. Waste is continuous with the economy of the world state, and cannot be eliminated from it because it has been so completely incorporated. As Buchloh describes, Hirschhorn creates a mechanomorphic carnality that fuses derma and techne, and extends into tentacles of monstrous hypertrophic growth (Buchloh 48).

Buchloh’s description derives from Felix Guattari’s exegesis on machinic heterogenesis in Chaosmosis. Guattari describes how technology grounds itself in living machinic systems in ways that are axiological, gathering and patterning social collectivity, semiotic relations, bodies, and desires. Ultimately, he outlines how the world is entirely mediated by and through an apparatus of machinic systems that function autopoietically, though this apparatus deploys itself in different registers of alterity. It installs itself in “Universes of virtuality beyond its existential territory, in constellations of incorporeal Universes of reference with unlimited combinatories and creativity” (Guattari 44). Its domains of alterity include the alterity between different machines and different parts of the same machine; the alterity of an internal material consistency; and the alterity of scale, or fractal alterity, which establishes a play of systematic correspondences between machines at different levels. Guattari strives to reconcile value and machines: to see values as immanent to machines, and machines as enunciative of values. He locates “machines of desire” and aesthetic creation within assemblages of subjectivation, and they are thus “called to relieve our old social machines which are incapable of keeping up with the efflorescence of machinic revolutions that shatter our epoch” (55). Machinic heterogenesis (the proliferation and development of zones of alterity, and axiological complexions within these zones) counterbalances the capitalistic homogenesis of generalized equivalency that appropriates machines into a singular economic instrument of power.

Hirschhorn’s treatment of the global resource economy links the ideologies of the world state to material substances and a precarious corporeal metabolism in which human bodies are bound up in procedures of diminishing returns of energy. He therefore exposes multiple registers of alterity within processes of machinic heterogenesis, making them visible for an ethical consideration of the human desire for sustenance and the condition of hunger within the homogenous waste economy. Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake visualizes the way that utopian dreaming succumbs to the economic impetus for accumulating human energies and is underpinned by the necessity of profit, which becomes a form of endless hunger that pre-empts a balanced metabolic cycle of need, provision, waste, and biodegradation. Hirschhorn shows a zero-waste economic system that requires hunger in order to perpetuate itself, thus foreclosing nourishment from the start.

Metabolisms within Economies

From this perspective, then, it becomes possible to see how Braungart and McDonough inadvertently pattern their technological solution to waste on a system of capitalist homogeneity that subsumes its ecological intentions into an economic instrument that deploys human energies in order to expand indefinitely. They make two intertwined assumptions that, while inaccurate, nevertheless explain why the forms of waste of industrial resource systems are misunderstood and difficult to visualize. First, they assume that the technosphere can be patterned on the biosphere in order to generate a zero-waste paradigm, and that this will succeed because ecosystems are fundamentally balanced and balancing. Second, they assume that the global economy is founded on a fair and rational exchange system that would support and complement a biomimetic waste system in all its dynamic complexity, when in fact the energetic imbalance of the economy predetermines biomimesis to homogeneity and failure. For all its pretensions of a more sophisticated form of sustainability, the zero-waste paradigm reiterates the metabolic rift at stake in nineteenth century labor, in which the biosphere is presumed to be a harmonious system, while industrial labor introduces imbalance and waste.¹ The prospect of separating the technosphere from the biosphere rests on the belief that there is a natural balance to be found and recuperated. But if, as McKenzie Wark argues, homeostasis is an unattainable ideal—nature is in the first place unstable, and always already understood in its agonistic encounter with human labor (200)—then the apparent dilemma presented by industrial waste is the following question: how can two opposing systems be reconciled within, on the one hand, a resource economy in which human labor has an antagonistic interaction with homeostatic nature that generates technospheric (industrial) waste, and, on the other hand, a resource economy that segregates and processes this excess in order to preserve that same ecosystem that the first disrupts? Paradoxically, the cradle-to-cradle system preserves its ideal of nature—articulated in its primary tenet that the biosphere and the technosphere can and should be separated—by insisting on the intensification of infrastructure and management of an economy that fundamentally and metabolically disrupts this ideal. This model does not ask where the infrastructure of upcycling will draw its energy, nor crucially, whether this energy will require another form of labor power that may potentially entail new types of waste. On what energy would this new infrastructure be “nourished”? While it suggests a revolution in design, urban dwelling, and low-cost energy technologies, the cradle-to-cradle system does not challenge the prevailing economy of resource harvesting, consumption, and profit at the expense of “energy slaves”—possibly human ones—that are sacrificed for the ideal of natural balance.

The source of the energy required to transform the resource system into two discrete spheres is uncertain. The utopian goal is the “nourishment” of both in such a way as to supply each with infinite and perpetual value. The confrontation between nature and labor-power seems to have disappeared from the equation, and the “imbalance” of waste is apparently resolved. In this way, the cradle-to-cradle model is underpinned by a contradictory capitalist economy. In Fredric Jameson’s description, the political causality for technological change is not the ingenuity of inventors, but rather labor unrest itself (58). In response to worker demands for higher wages and better working conditions, the capitalist introduces new machinery. Hence the contradiction: while the progress of capitalism produces ever-greater misery for workers, class struggle is responsible for the greater productivity of capitalism. The zero-waste model of product-design and consumption assumes that there are technological (particularly chemical) solutions to the problem of environmental toxicity. But the technological solution nevertheless remains nested within an imbalanced economic system. In resolving the problem of waste through the management of nutrient cycles, the authors do not account for the energy cycles that already power the economy’s expansion, which include the struggles of the labor force to nourish themselves even as they fuel the system’s production, and the complete denial of nourishment for the unemployed who ensure a standing reserve of potential employees that keep the standard level of wages as low as possible.

Jameson proposes unemployment as the primary condition through which to understand the paradoxical energy system of the economy. Not only is global unemployment structurally inseparable from the accumulation and expansion of capitalism; it is a state of fundamental dysfunction, misery, and idleness on which the system relies. Unemployment flattens out “multiple situations … of naked life in all the metaphysical senses in which the sheer biological temporality of existences without activity and without production can be interpreted” (Jameson 151). What better definition of waste than this state of dysfunctionality that produces a cross-section of beings, confines them to corporeal uselessness, and binds them to its own degenerating materials? As Jameson argues, the capitalist system is a unity of opposites. It is both open and closed, so that on the one hand it operates by openness and expansion (accumulation, appropriation, and imperialism), while on the other hand it stagnates and dies if it remains stable and cannot expand. It therefore must “interiorize everything that was hitherto exterior to it” (Jameson 146). This means that even an ecologically sound proposal to upcycle products through the successful recirculation and management of nutrients is on a continuum with a larger system—an assemblage—that absorbs all sources of energy for the purposes of its own expansion, while relying on a state of impoverishment and waste that appears on a register seemingly unrelated to planetary health—unemployment. But as Jameson insists,

those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, ‘dropped out of history,’ who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases, the subjects of so-called ‘failed states’ (a new and self-serving pseudo-concept), or of ecological disaster or of old-fashioned survivals of allegedly immemorial, archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, the victims of famine whether man-made or natural—all these populations at best confined in camps of various kinds, and ministered by various NGOs and other sources of international philanthropy—our reading suggests that these populations, surely the vessels of a new kind of global and historical misery, will look very different when considered in terms of the category of unemployment. (149)

Hirschhorn’s visualization of global capital encompasses both a zero-waste scenario and global hunger as coextensive facets of the same system. Given Jameson’s commentary, we might also see how Big Cake enacts global capital’s instrumentalization of zero-waste technologies as the dispersal of the condition of “unemployment” across people, objects, and substances that are fused together within the system’s absorption and wasting of life, even as it spreads and disseminates its impoverished bio-techno materiality.

This disturbing situation remains unseen, however, because of the strength of the belief that zero-waste systems are biomimetic, that biomimetic systems promote biodiversity and life in their self-regulation, and that their distribution of energy is non-hierarchical and non-disruptive. In this sense, the zero-waste model relies on a common analogy between ecological balance and a market ecology, in which the lives of organisms, individuals, and collectives are “naturally” born and returned to the balance of the whole. Because the processes of expending and absorbing energy are part of symbiosis, the terms of cycling and recycling nutrients are accepted as metabolic and not economic per se. George Bataille’s theory of economy takes this hierarchical transfer of energy as essential to the character of an economy and of societies (see Bataille). Whether that transfer occurs through predatory consumption or organized rituals of sacrifice, the absorption of energy always comes at the expense of a violently sacrificed being or object. Such a model of energy transfer acknowledges that the relationship between resource systems and their earthly sources may be agonistic precisely because symbiosis itself is a chaotic and capricious system. The harmony of the biosphere is fundamentally indifferent to human values. To maintain energy within an expanding human economy, however, requires a hyper-vigilance toward the ways that energy escapes the system. Cradle-to-cradle might simply be a biotic metaphor for hermetically sealing the energies that drive capitalist development while turning a blind eye both to the current ecological condition that takes the complexity of dynamic anthropogenic change as a given, and to the psyche of desire and consumption that underlies the expansion of the economy.

Where Hirschhorn synthesizes the contradictory relationship between the material plenitude of global capitalism and the starving multitudes that rely on its energy, the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo brings this dilemma to the scale of the individual body in its relationship to consumer products. She shows how the material realities of the economic mechanomorph converge on the body and its desires for sustenance, fulfillment, and access to an energy reserve that will provide it with homeostasis as well. Her works frequently stage her body in tension with household objects in domestic scenarios. Bonajo describes her household furniture as a “condensation of material energy,” speculating how long she could live off that energy, and describing how she dreams of burning everything she has (Bonajo). Her photograph series imagine this cathartic fantasy of escaping the capitalist grid, but they also invoke a palpable sense of suffering and self-destruction, as though to sacrifice oneself would be a kind of autopoietic response to the perpetuation of the economic system that absorbs the energy of bodies through their own processes of impoverishment. Bonajo’s only option is to remain bound to her material objects, particularly her furniture.

Consider Figure 2, After Life Against the World (2012): a woman lies on a layer of toilet paper rolls, decorated by birthday candles and lipsticks, on top of her kitchen counter.

Fig. 2
Melanie Bonajo, After Life Against the World, 2012. Copyright Melanie Bonajo. Photograph courtesy of the artist.

Her surface morphology is remolded by a layer of ambiguous substance that looks like clay but stands in as icing, given the positioning of the candles on top. The fridge below is conspicuously open so that one can scan the food inside. The woman could be read as a redistributed and feminized version of Hirschhorn’s Big Cake. Bonajo presents an ambivalent scene of a body regulated between capitalist plenitude (she recreates herself as a cake–we can even see the flour on the floor as evidence of this process) and physical powerlessness (she is naked, smothered by inert substance, lit up, but lying down and caught in an axis of shelving supports, each placed like a geometric compass, in a play on Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man). Bonajo thus articulates the constricted dilemma of symbiosis with an always-hungry and expanding energy system. The woman does not sit down to eat the food in her fridge, but is instead delivered up on the counter as an energy reserve in her own right.

Bonajo’s mobilization of the body as an object to be consumed and its positioning in relation to furniture and other commodities, calls to mind Graham Harman’s provocative account of tool-being. I have been arguing that bodies and energies are incorporated into the global economy and become unseen forms of waste; Harman argues that the world is an empire of equipment, and that existence or being is not an exclusively human experience, but is integral to a broader tool-being. He writes,

Every being is entirely absorbed into this world-system, assigned to further possibilities in such a way that there could never be any singular end-point within the contexture of reference. In this strict sense, the world has no parts. Beings are not only tool-beings in some limited private way; rather, they should be utterly swallowed up into a single system of tool-being, a total empire of equipment. (43)

Where Guattari observes an expansive system of machinic heterogenesis that is put under duress by a homogenous capitalist machine, Harman describes an all-encompassing global equipment to which human beings find themselves adjoined. Bonajo exposes the adjoinment and the co-implication of body and furniture in an energy system that provokes the desire to expend oneself into and as an integral part of the global equipment of that system.

Ecological Deprivation and the Wasting of Biological Life

The conjunction between the global economy, its appropriative energy system, and its internalization of waste takes on a geological scale when understood in relation to climate change. Tara Donovan’s landscapes of Styrofoam and plastic objects speak to this new register of the industrial resource economy. Donovan recapitulates the restriction of the closed resource system and the impossibility of regeneration, with a particular focus on petrochemical materials such as plastics and other polymers, which irrevocably displace the elemental substance of the planet itself in her work. For example, Donovan’s Untitled (Plastic Cups) (2006–2015; Fig. 3) is a vision of anthropogenic change in which thousands of plastic cups stacked at different levels create the illusion of a glacial topography of undulating snow banks.

Fig. 3
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Plastic Cups), 2006–2015. Plastic cups. Dimensions variable. Copyright Tara Donovan. Photograph courtesy of the artist and Pace Gallery.

The installation takes the viewer from the scale of an individual object (the single plastic cup) to the phenomenon of global warming through its strong visual associations with Arctic landscapes and glacial melt. More strongly, it is haunted by the concept of the Anthropocene: the era of human carbon history and its devastating ecological effects, including the extinction of innumerable species and the sedimentation of carbon and nuclear toxicity, all of which is measureable in geological strata. Importantly, this era is not simply an imminent crisis, but one that will predetermine the very fabric of the planet in the future. The waste of the industrial resource economy has an unshakeable perpetuity; it is a hyperobject “massively distributed in time and space,” as Timothy Morton argues (1). Donna Haraway forges a connection between the Anthropocene and the concept of the “Capitalocene,” in which the crisis of anthropogenic changes to the planet are not fundamental to the human species per se, but rather to the historic economic system and its reliance on carbon fuels. The Capitalocene acknowledges that the geological time frame entails a conjunction of registers from a human system to planetary systems. The planetary impact of the Capitalocene becomes measurable and visualizable through the specific forms of waste that the system produces. As an entity, it has a flat organismic toll; species and biotic life, human energy slaves, whole nations, and human civilization itself have all been squandered in Donovan’s portrayal of the planet’s future. Yet this toll is evident only in the multitudes of plastic cups, a veritable graveyard of consumer products. There are no inhabitants in this landscape, which may not be capable of sustaining life at all. Despite the impressive number of cups and their plenitude as a totality, they are all empty, with no possibility of ever being used for their original function: being filled to quench thirst. The technological sophistication of the disposable plastic cup has become a scene of dysfunctionality in which the “unemployed” products are frozen in a standing reserve of organized but useless human garbage.

Donovan’s installation therefore discloses a different register than Hirschhorn’s Big Cake, with its conflicted and roiling waste system that barely sustains life, albeit through the violent competition for scarce resources and diminishing returns of “nutrients.” This is an alternative view of the impoverishment stemming from a system that feeds off the desire for sustenance from a limited source of energy. It is instead an ecological extension of that system as a catastrophic waste of life. Donovan lays bare the global equipment of the capitalist energy system and the permanent waste it produces from the perspective of geological time. Energy has dissipated and life has disappeared while earthly material is displaced with petrochemical objects. The installation encompasses the endpoint after the biosphere and technosphere have coingested one another, producing a figuration of emptiness, lifelessness, and entropy. Donovan’s vision is therefore akin to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in its forecasting of the future of industrial production as entropic stasis. More pointedly, she articulates this landscape of ruins through a multitude of objects that are interlocked, nested in one another and carefully placed to generate a gestalt. Thus the remains of the expended system are also indexes of its existence as a complex equipment that extended itself into every object it produced and recuperated every object into itself. The corporeal energies that powered this closed system have disappeared, leaving only the inanimate objects that were once the tools and appendages through which it yielded its energy.

Vision across the Registers of Waste

Hirschhorn, Bonajo, and Donovan each visualize facets of an industrial resource system that functions as an autopoietic energy-economy of diminishing returns. The very inhabitants and operators of the system are denied sustenance, while the system is powered by the hunger of those beings that feed off it. This energetic depletion of life permeates the registers of economy—object production and consumption, individual and planetary metabolism—to produce a state of totalizing waste in the future. The real waste generated by such a system remains invisible to cradle-to-cradle models of product design and consumption that rely on technological innovation, and zero-waste proposals do not grasp the scale of waste produced by the industrial resource complex. The wasting system of the global energy economy is massively distributed in time and space, stretching across registers of human and biotic life. The artists considered here advance a critical visuality insofar as they articulate forms of connection between unacknowledged or invisible waste and the system that produces them. They expose and elaborate the coextensiveness of human and ecological wasting with the system’s diminishing energy levels. Most importantly, their works force us to consider waste more broadly, not as merely systemic pollution, but in energetic terms as well. Both human and biotic life become energy resources for the economy, and the spoilage of that system. In that case, we must ask what the axiological underpinnings of zero-waste are, and what they must become in order to address the real ecology of waste.

Footnotes

1. Marx describes the ways in which agricultural technologies introduced a molecular imbalance in cycles of nature (see Foster, Clark, and York).

Works Cited

• Bataille, George. The Accursed Share. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Print.
• Bonajo, Melanie. “Interview Melanie Bonajo.” i heart photograph. Blog. 18 Mar. 2008. http://iheartphotograph.blogspot.de/2008/03/interview-melanie-bonajo.html. Web. Accessed September 26, 2016.
• Buchloh, Benjamin. “Detritus and Decrepitude: The Sculpture of Thomas Hirschhorn.” Oxford Art Journal 24.2 (2001): 41-56. Print.
• Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Print.
• Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Trans. Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. Print.
• Haraway, Donna. “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159-165. Print.
• Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. Print.
• Hawkins, Gay. “Plastic Bags: Living with Rubbish.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2001): 5-23. Print.
• Hirschhorn, Thomas. “Artist’s Statement.” Paris, 1999.
• Jameson, Fredric. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. New York: Verso, 2011. Print.
• McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York: North Point P, 2002. Print.
• Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. Print.
• Toy, Mary-Anne. “China’s first eco-village proves a hard sell.” The Age. 26 August 2006. Web. 3 June 2016.
• Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso, 2015. Print.