Labor Creates All Wealth Part I: Garbage

I left my decidedly unglamorous job at Socrates Sculpture Park about six weeks ago, for another part-time dayjob that pays more than twice as much. Where I am not in charge of the trash, or otherwise doing anyone else's manual labor.

I'm respectable now. Clean fingernails. And not only is my bank account literally bursting with joy, I also get an opportunity to understand why I write, and the nature of this blog.

I've been quiet these days, and it's because I have more in common with Dishwasher Pete than I thought I did. I have no desire to bag dead cats or hump hipsters' art in every sculpture park in America. But for years I have been writing to work through the space between how stupid we all conceive manual labor to be and how rich, intricate and relevant the world of a laborer actually is.

Not having any manual labor to do or any trash to manage has left me without much to say. My back hurts less, but I feel intellectually dislocated.

Understanding labor and garbage are the most serious, most interesting intellectual and political inquiries I can imagine undertaking. We (in the broadest sense) have gotten so accustomed to Others doing manual labor and hauling our refuse Away that we cannot imagine what on earth you can learn from your trash hauler. Why it's important to understand exactly what happens to the dumpster after it leaves your park. Or why tires are not allowed in dumpsters--how pernicious they really are. I don't think it impacts your driving habits to know that tires are not merely dirty and smelly and flammable, but that they're also an impossible shape to throw away. That they collect water, which means they collect mosquitoes, which means disease. And that they also rise up out of landfills because they trap air the same way they trap water.

That you can't even recycle them unless you expend an amazing quantity of energy shredding them and removing the steel belting.

I don't think this knowledge, as knowledge is meaningful in terms of actual miles logged and why. You know what I think is meaningful? Learning all this from your trash hauler, because you and he are fishing tires out of a dumpster for two hours. Because he won't leave until the tires are, once again, your problem.

There are a number of intellectual problems attached to labor, so right now, to get fired back up, I want to focus on garbage.

Away does not exist. It's a myth. Nobody understands that Away is a myth except the person who is in charge of making things go Away. Nobody. The myth of Away is just too powerful and seductive, and there are too many other things to do. And there is nothing more important to our collective future as a race than understanding this myth as such. Not in a talking about how cool environmentalism is while sitting in traffic in your landrover sipping a frappucino kind of way, but in an implicated,

dare I say "dirty handed,"

kind of way.

The bottom line is that the human race is never going to survive unless we enter some kind of collectivist global kibbutz phase, in which everyone, globally, takes turns growing food, building towns, and throwing away the inevitable waste produced by these ventures. Think Jimmy Carter building a Habitat for Humanity house, but bigger. And not for feelgood reasons, but for intellectual reasons. Because practical ignorance and the collapse of fact and process into myths like Away is exactly what makes unsustainability possible.

I mean rampant.

I am selfish and I am expedient. Nobody loves the idea of Away more than I do. And because I have managed trash and talked at length with John Corrieri (my favorite dumpster philosopher) about where it all goes, I am physically compelled to reuse my metrocard. I actually do try to plan so that I don't need to buy anything "to go." I work to remember a canvas bag. Not because I am reading The World Without Us, but because I have had my refuse refused and had to figure out some other place for it to go. Because I have been responsible for the amazing volume of smelly waste less than 1000 people can create in a few hours while they watch a movie in a park.

I work in an office now. Like civilized people. My new employer is a beautiful human being who cares tremendously about a large number of things. Huge heart.

Prints out every single email, reads it, and then shreds it.

This behavior is not a function of not caring. It's a function of not knowing. Or of having only a conceptual knowlege of the word "waste." Someone else who's in charge of Away.

It's a function of delegation.

I am not better or more careful than this person. I have merely lived through a different set of practical experiences that I was allowed to be intellectually curious about.

It's not just garbage. We do ourselves a serious intellectual disservice when we lose control of what we make--when we turn it into what is made for us. When we don't question why and how, but merely expect it to work. The manifold myths of labor are even more pernicious than the Myth of Away.

More on this later.

Comments

[Eric]

I live in the sticks in upstate New York. To keep the property taxes low (most of the people who live in the town I live in do not have any money to spare) they have no garbage pick up. The dump is a few country roads away from the house I live in and it is open seven days a week. Dave, this bearded, toothless, really nice guy works at the dump, and I talk with him almost every time I take our trash there. I haul it in the back of the midget station wagon I drive, which is a 1991 Buick Century. Taking your own garbage to the dump really puts a different perspective on things. Throwing your trash down a chute or leaving it on the curb does not make you think about the amount and type of refuse you generate. Dostoyevsky pointed out, in the mid 1800s I guess, that the Russian people were treating the planet like a hotel. Make a mess, and move on. We won't be saved by the space program. We won't escape to some virgin planet we can start all over on again, once we thoroughly corrupt the beautiful and rare accident known as Earth. The communitarian route you describe as perhaps the only viable option for us, if we want to survive into the future, makes sense. I am not convinced though that we are capable of going that route, but perhaps if there is a major catastrophe that wipes out large swathes of the earth’s population, we will finally be moved to act collectively in a positive, life affirming way.

[Noah]

great post. Makes me think about:

Archeologists call the landfills of yore middens, I think. Of course, in days of yore, away wasn't so far away, just over there near where the oysters where caught in the first place. But still not near the beds. There are big piles of oyster shells to be found by archeologists around here.

Silk road era away was pretty far away, but was expensive enough that you couldn't just do it all the time. Those spices were a big deal. Now, I complain about organic spices costing 5 times as much as non organic.

Today, organic often means seriously away. But my non-away food only comes to the park from late June until November or December. And only on Saturdays. And the better stuff isn't organic.

Container freight, the perfection of away. Cheaper to send your own nearby raw material to have it labored upon by really away others, and then send it back, than to labor upon it around here.

As much of the rest of the world gets stricter about dangerous industrial stuff, America is becoming a new away. We are allowed to eat/wear/use things that are considered too dangerous for many other people.

[Pretty Lady]

Congratulations on your new job!

I am actually encouraged when I see how much our attitude toward garbage has changed, how quickly. Mexico's attitudes toward garbage are roughly those of what I imagine the U.S. was like, fifty to a hundred years ago--the world is their garbage can. Driving across the desert toward Zacatecas, the rubbish covers the landscape in every direction as far as the eye can see; pulling over on a remote winding road between Xilitla and Guanajuato, the edge of the forest proves to be knee-deep in trash at least a hundred yards from the road, no matter where you stop. There's no such thing as recycling, although you do get a deposit on beer bottles.

This all changed in our country around the time of 'Give a Hoot, Don't Pollute,' I believe. It will get better.

On another note, I wonder if I write so much partly because my money-making job involves manual labor as well...

[Chris Rywalt]

I find that Americans have a curiously two-sided view of garbage. On the one hand, they say we should recycle because once we throw something away, it's gone forever. On the other hand, they say we should recycle because once something ends up in a dump, it's there forever.

Obviously these ideas are at odds. And both wrong.

I'm appalled at how wasteful we've become. Any parent with young children knows how overwhelmed a house can become with Happy Meal toys. I see a Happy Meal toy and I think of two things: First I imagine the child on the assembly line in China making this crap for us -- making a toy they'll never have time to play with because they're too busy working. And second I see how the rest of the world can hate us, since we're so unbelievably wealthy we can enslave the planet to make us disposable toys to come with our food.

Not to mention that so many of these things now come with embedded batteries that can't be removed. I can't wait to hear on the news what they're leaching into our lives.

[Oriane Stender]

Deborah,

This is a beautiful and thought-provoking post. I'm sure you know the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles. She did a project, some years back, where she shook the hand of every NYC sanitation worker.
http://www.feldmangallery.com/media/ukeles/touch-sanitation-01.jpg
I'm not sure if she called it a performance, or what, but it was about acknowledging the work of the people who make garbage go Away. She also showed a piece at last year's Armory show which consisted of a mirror-plated garbage truck. Once you knew the history of her work, the piece took on a lot more significance (seeing our waste mirrored back at us, etc.) than if you saw it there for the first time.

On the issue of labor, don't you think our separation from the world of manual labor is part of why we are driven to make art (I mean those of us who make art with our hands)? To recreate a lost connection with material, with the physical production of stuff? Most people in white collars jobs don't "make" anything now. They've lost that link that people used to have with the creation of things. Some people maintain that link through cooking, or gardening, or through some craft or hobby, like knitting or making model airplanes. I think that need to be connected to something that humans used to take for granted in order to survive is one reason I make art.

But I also have issues of worrying that there are too many "things" already present in the world, things that will eventually end up as landfill, and that making more things is a selfish and ultimately destructive (to the earth) act. One way I deal with this is to only make art out of already existing things. Granted, this is more a conceptual fix than an actual one, but it helps make it ok for me to place more things in an already crowded world.

Thanks for making me think about this today.

[Steve Durbin]

Deborah,

It's so true, people ignore what's not in front of them (and often even that). The same applies to the front end where they produce all those "green" products that you're supposed to buy to save the environment.

Just yesterday I came across a review of the documentary Dirty Jobs, which I bet you'd enjoy. I'm requesting it myself.

[MBT Online]

It's so nice to have you do all of the research for us. It makes our decision making so much easier!! Thanks.