This book is about waste and its inevitability in human culture and society.

Waste could be said to be one of the universal conditions of human existence, albeit one most often kept at bay or on the fringes of awareness. Waste: On the Limits of Human Life looks at its subject within the long perspective necessary to come to terms with how it has existed as a shapeshifting presence that seems to attach itself to human life at every turn, in every age and epoch.

It is a book about how people have lived with the phenomena of waste, made use of them and dreamt of escaping or conquering them once and for all. Finally, it is about how waste never disappears, but rather only proliferates anew as what might be described as life-plus-minus.

Contents

Introduction: Waste is Life Plus Minus

1 Matter: Sewers, Filth and Sanitarians

2 Objects: Consume, Accumulate, Destroy

3 Resources: Reclaim, Recover, Recycle

4 Aesthetics: Designing and Dematerializing

5 Projections: Wastelands, Real and Imagined

6 Temporalities: Deep, Infinite and Meaningless

Conclusion: Data Wastelands

Editions
Reaktion Books (Forthcoming, 2025)
University of Chicago Press (Forthcoming, 2005)