My postdoctoral research project at the time was to work on a history of garbage. I am ashamed to say that, although I have been collaborating with Professor Tian for more than a year, there has been little real progress under this topic, and whether I will ultimately be able to turn it into my exit report is somewhat worrying. One compromise would be to write the exit report on the history of technology or the philosophy of technology, while inserting discussions of garbage at appropriate points.
My intention to study garbage was not a whim, nor did I think of this topic merely because I happened to collaborate with Professor Tian. I believe that the problem of garbage is indeed an important philosophical problem, one that any philosopher of technology—especially any philosopher of technology who reflects on modernity—cannot avoid. In fact, even in philosophical speculation more generally, the problem of garbage is everywhere. Questions about truth, goodness, and beauty, about being, about time, about value and meaning, all involve the problem of garbage. Of course, I am referring to contemporary philosophical thought. Ancient philosophers would naturally not confront the problem of garbage head-on, because the very concept of garbage is modern.
The concept of garbage is historical; in fact, like science and technology, it is a modern concept that took shape only very recently.
Many people will protest that there was garbage in ancient times too. This line of thought is actually similar to the insistence that ancient China also had science. We can indeed say that ancient China also had science, but we must emphasize in what sense we can say so—many people merely take the contemporary concept of science as the standard, sift through ancient texts for isolated phrases, and classify them as scientific achievements. But in any case, we must remain clear-headed: the things unearthed in this way did not belong, in the eyes of the ancients, to the same category. The ancients did not have a concept akin to “science” that could subsume the class of things we now regard as science.
Likewise, of course we can find many things in the life-worlds of ancient people that we now regard as “garbage,” yet ancient people did not regard them in the same way that we moderns regard garbage.
So when I focus on the historicity of garbage, I am not concerned, in an archaeological sense, with the origins and trajectories of certain specific objects; rather, in an intellectual-historical sense, I am examining the evolution of the ways people look at things, and asking how garbage is possible at all, beyond garbage.
It is no surprise that various scattered “scientific achievements” should appear in ancient civilizations, but for “science” to appear as a concept with clearly defined boundaries—that could not have emerged from nowhere. In fact, the “Scientific Revolution” is precisely the event that first laid the groundwork for the modern meaning of the concept of “science.”
Although what we are concerned with is intellectual history, ideas do not grow automatically in some place far removed from the world of dust and toil; transformations in ideas often involve transformations in social structure, and the two are mutually causal and mutually influential. The emergence of “garbage” is related to both urbanization and the Industrial Revolution; garbage is also a product of civilization. Just as Foucault revealed madness as a product of civilization, we might, through textual study and close analysis, discover that some prehistoric human being also suffered from madness; this fact would not refute Foucault’s conclusion.
This is the first essay in the series of loose talks on garbage that I am preparing to write, so I want to make the basic mode of discussion clear in advance, lest I talk at length only to have someone throw at me, in the end, “Ancient people also shit, so ancient times also had garbage,” and then the conversation would simply become impossible to continue.
From the etymology of the word “garbage” in both Chinese and English, one can indeed find some kinds of “garbage” that also existed in ancient times, such as “construction spoil,” “filth,” “scraps,” “rags,” and so on. These things, too, ancient people had to “throw away”: after building a house, for instance, the excess spoil had to be cleared away; when roasting chicken or duck, the innards and other scraps also had to be discarded. It is precisely because these things are characterized by being “thrown away” that the concept referring to these specific discarded things developed into a concept referring to discarded things in general—that is, garbage.
What is such a big deal about grouping together spoiled earth, waste wood, waste cloth, waste scraps, and other discarded things in specific situations, and giving them a collective name? Let me make an analogy. For example, people are “discarded” in all sorts of situations: those who fail the college entrance exam are called unsuccessful candidates, those who cannot find work are called unemployed, those who are fired are called laid-off workers, those who are dumped by their partners are called lovelorn people… But do we need to group all these people together and give them a collective name, say “waste material,” and then build waste-material bins, waste-material carts, waste-material yards, waste-material recycling stations, and so on, to house this kind of person specifically?
So, the phenomenon of being discarded that appears in various concrete situations may have a similar structure: a thing is abandoned because, within a certain context, it is useless. But the existence of this common structure does not mean that we can lump together all those discarded things across all forms of abandonment. Such classification contains more meaning than that. For example, we can say that there are “opponents” in different concrete settings, but to reduce all opponents to “reactionaries” is not merely a play on words; it may well signify a rigid social order.
Construction spoil is discarded as construction spoil in building activities; scraps are discarded as scraps in cooking activities. They are not discarded as “garbage” in the general sense. Today, however, as Professor Tian said, when we throw something into a trash bin, it immediately becomes “garbage”; it is detached from its own category and becomes a new kind of thing, or rather, becomes a kind of thing without category. Of course, we can still do “garbage sorting,” but that is like distinguishing a “black five category” within the “reactionaries,” and devising different schemes of “transformation” (recycling); this is already something operating under a new social order.
When we gather all kinds of discarded things together as “garbage,” a new conceptual framework and a new social order are already at work. This is the architecture of modernity, or, one might say, Gestell.
Heidegger says that the essence of modern technology is Gestell; what does that mean? Every technology is directive and revealing in some sense, and exists within some network of referential relations: the waterwheel connects river water and the mill, roads connect towns and fields, and every thing has its place. But where does the difference between modern technology and ancient technology lie? It is like the difference between the modern concept of space and the ancient concept of place. The modern, Cartesian concept of “space” no longer designates the corresponding “environment” in which some specific thing is situated. Things are detached from their “environment” and inserted into a priori, unified, already-fixed coordinate system. For modern people, although every thing still has its “position,” this position is no longer a place in the ancient sense, defined by a certain surrounding field; rather, it is as though outside the network of referential relations there exists a total, panoramic, visualized frame in which the position of every thing has already been “customized” in advance. Every thing can be detached from its environment and measured within this unified framework.
Thus, discussing whether something is “worth” doing becomes a question of whether a thing “has value” (see the old post Ethics Objectified), and the question of whether something should be “discarded” also becomes a question of whether that thing is “garbage.”
“Garbage” as “useless things” is precisely the complement of “technology” as “useful things.” Ancient technology did not form a unified Gestell, and so useless things could only subsist in the gaps between various environments of use; they could not be summed up as a domain of beings. In the modern age, however, technology constitutes a unified Gestell that leaves no “margin”; therefore, only things expelled from this Gestell can be brought together under a single term.
So the fact that modern people treat garbage differently from ancient people does not mean that ancient people were careful to “make full use of everything,” while modern people were especially wasteful and threw things away before exhausting their value. On the contrary, only modern people have the possibility of “using things up” (and thereby turning them into garbage that is no longer useful). To say that a piece of wood should burn completely, and to say that its phlogiston should be exhausted, are clearly two different concepts; a thing burned to ashes is not the same as a thing devoid of phlogiston. Things that have been discarded and no longer used are not the same as things that are of no use whatsoever.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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