Links for Waste

Nathan Ensmenger:
http://homes.sice.indiana.edu/nensmeng/bio.html
https://thecomputerboys.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iep_57XKfQk
Burtynsky: https://www.edwardburtynsky.com/
Mel Hogan:
https://melhogan.com/website/
Screening:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/ewaste

Google's Data Centers

A central cooling plant in Google's Douglas County, Georgia, data center.

PHOTOs: GOOGLE/CONNIE ZHOU

Core Post: Thoughts on ontological and epistemological continuity

This week I chose to read Jussi Parikka’s “Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media” and Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Four Regimes of Entropy.” I was immediately struck by how both authors make a case for ecology understood in terms that are ontologically and epistemologically continuous. For Parikka, this gesture occurs in the erasure of a distinction between nature and culture. He writes:

The idea of media as a contraction and folding of time and space underlines the insight that time and space are not just solid and stable backgrounds for action or communication. They are themselves in continuous movement and mutation and are attached to the relations in which they are formed. Nature and media are subsequently to be understood not as distinct ontological regimes but both are to be seen in terms of processuality and becoming in the manner that the recent Deleuzian wave of theory has suggested (36).

I agree with Parikka that space and time are not just solid, stable backgrounds for action and also think that accounting for ecological and ontological continuity is incredibly urgent. However, I’m suspicious of the assertion that our knowledge of this continuity is self-evident. Again, eco-critical and new materialist ontologies may be more important now than ever. That said, we might also need to continue remembering the ways that knowledge itself has limits, discrepancies and is intimately tied to interpretation, politics and power.

In this respect, I found myself both fascinated and frustrated by Pasquinelli’s essay. Fascinated because the inorganic ecology and geology he lays out is unexpected and compelling. That being said, I wonder to what extent substituting the gene for the cell as a unit of study displaces the problems of figurative language rather than solves them. After all, the premise of his essay is a questioning of the continuity of technical metaphor and biological metaphor. For Pasquinelli, moving from the gene to the cell seems to imply a shift from the figurative to the real. This is an interesting move and set of questions, but unfortunately I don’t think there’s any way to bypass the figurative and its interpretation.

I myself know almost nothing about genetics and cell biology, so I will avoid commenting on those parts of the essay. Where I found myself irritated was the portion where the author claims that a digital logos is outside of an economy of energy. He writes, “Digital networks are purely mathematical spaces: no gravity, no friction, no entropy whatsoever. The ethics and aesthetics of the digital, its Free Culture and Remix Culture, are possible thanks to such a virtually zero-energy engine,” (64). As we read in Nathan Ensmenger and Mél Hogan’s article, both of which I liked very much, this simply isn’t true. My contention isn’t that ontological continuity is irrelevant, but that obscuring figurative knowledge (as well as the limits of such knowledge) risks reifying something like a non-entropic digital logos as self-evident truth.

All this said, Pasquinelli’s paper also contains elements that allow for an alternative reading. He briefly comments on the etymology of the word organism, that it derives from the Greek ergon, which he translates to energy. I would add that ergon doesn’t just mean energy, but work measured in terms of energy’s expenditure. As work, the term not only designates expenditure, but the delimitation of a field: that which is properly work and that which isn’t. I couldn’t help thinking of another post-structuralist thinker’s interpretation of the ergon, Derrida’s. For him, the ergon’s coherence as a unified field depends on something like a frame: the parergon. This frame is both continuous and discontinuous with the ergon. Like a parasite, the parergon contaminates the ergon from the inside. It is at once the ergon’s condition of possibility as well as the point where that possibility is threatened with destruction. Instead of fetishizing continuity for itself, a concept like Derrida’s parergon allows us to think both continuity and rupture. More importantly, it recognizes how practices of knowledge may always depend on the transcendental while also situating spaces that avoid overdetermination, spaces where we might think critique and change.

core post 5

Because my scholarly attention generally resides in and through Japan, one of the articles I selected to read from the collection of essays in Medianatures was Yoshida’s comparative work on waste and pollution between the United States and Japan. A comprehensive account of the relationships between the development of high-tech technology and the growing sophistication of material and chemical waste, he also draws the connections between “capitalist business activity, and the environmental problems caused by high-tech development.” (113) Therefore, he concludes that these environmental problems have an economic background. This isn’t surprising, or at least wasn’t surprising when I was reading it. Until I was reminded that he wrote this in 1994. Immediately following his conclusion that high-tech pollution in 80’s and 90’s Japan has economic histories and implications, he cites his earlier work The Economics of Environment and Technology (Tokyo, Aoki Shoten Publisher, 1980), where he analyzes the relationships between business practices and environmental problems. He lists 5 conclusions, but I’ll list the ones that stood out to me: 

1.     “Because of the pursuit of profit and ‘cost-down’ by businesses, svaings on environmental protection apparatuses causes environmental disruption.”

2.     “Severe competition for new brands & chemical developments within a limited time by big companies forces them to omit the installation of safety check of new products.”

Immediately, I thought of the Fukushima Nuclear disaster and the recent acquittal of the three former Tokyo Electric Power company executives accused of criminal negligence for their roles in the Fukushima meltdown. Although the company itself still faces civil litigation, the executives claimed that there the subsequent disaster following the earthquake was somehow unforeseeable. In 2012, Japan’s NAIIC found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable, but more importantly, TEPCO had failed to meet the basic safety requirements, such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and developing evacuation plans. Such requirements certainly fall under the parameters of the companies opting to omit the installation of safety checks and environmental protection apparatuses, as Yoshida concluded—but more importantly, warned. 

Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan (2013) examines Japan’s structural conditions and socioeconomic lives post-3/11. One of the chapters specifically deals with Fukushima and how the disaster has since affected these families who were forced to evacuate, displacing a lot of their family and work to “safe” regions/towns. However, for those families who weren’t able to find employment in these other areas, they felt compelled to return, or at least reside, in areas that still risked contamination. At the current pace of the clean-up program, it’s estimated that decontamination will take 30-40 years. However, that “time” is something that these families and individuals can’t afford to lose; many of these families and groups are upwards of 40. 

The readings have addressed the subtleties of waste and addressing the myth immateriality/invisibility of waste. Obfuscation has been the leitmotif in many of the weeks of the class, as we have all keenly noted the ways that obfuscation has been configured deliberately or unintentionally, illuminating the ways that technology or the "digital" is this or isn’t that. With that being said, the Fukushima disaster and its aftermath, seems to be the disastrous and explosive culmination of 'immaterial" relations among high-tech, the economic and political relations in hand, the social repercussions being unearthed. It only took one of the largest earthquakes, recorded tsunamis, and natural disasters to show what Yoshida had concluded and warned about 3 decades prior. 

Wind Media

Jussi Parrika's article from the MediaNatures collection (Media Ecologies and Imaginary Media: Transversal Expansions, Contractions, and Foldings) made me think of this recent (and beautiful) piece by Yuriko Furuhata for the new journal Media+Environment. In this article, Furuhata looks at wind and urban space in Hong Kong and uses the metaphorical (as a folkloric creature) and the literal meaning of Dragons (the opening in the middle of big apartment complexes) to propose a new understanding of the city.

Also participating in this conversation visual artist Wangshui's 2017 short film "From its mouth came a river of high end residential appliances" also examines the relation between wind (through drone technologies) and the urban politics of Hong Kong.

Conceptual halo of waste Core Post 5

Viney Willam writes in his book Waste “Objects called ‘waste’ can have a peculiarly telescopic effect on our imaginations.

They are things that seem to disclose ways of living, permit certain ways of seeing and give access to wider actions, collectives, and environments.”

The conceptual halo of the word waste is surrounded by words like rubbish, trash, garbage. These are things that have fallen out of use, fallen out of the engineering logic of the usefulness, fallen out from a system. Time can be wasted. People are called white trash. Waste is never a priory existent, it is a state that presupposes a binary opposite. The pressure to become invisible because unwanted is a consequence of becoming waste.

Dirt and noise is waste. It is “matter out of place” (Mary Douglas Purity and Danger) or out of order as disordered and non-functional at the same time. To become waste includes the gesture of becoming obsolete or to be discarded; it involves affects such as abjection and disgust.

“Waste might indeed suggest a sense of temporal disruption, but it is also matter that lingers and remains, it is that category of thing conspicuous for coming to be by having been.” (Viney Willam Waste)

In the context of digital culture, it becomes clear that the materiality of its production, distribution, and final processing as waste hasn’t vanished, rather concealed by euphemisms like ‘cloud’ or very much tied back to material processes like ‘mining’. All readings point at the uneven distribution of the processes (resources, manufacturing labor, including access to, final processing, environmental and personal consequences of toxicity) enabling control and amplifying inequality.

Jussi Parikka point also at a different time scales inherent in the technological fetish objects becoming obsolete in an ever-increasing rate where the object’s “inner time” radically shifts when it becomes waste. Striped from it functions it turns into a material that refuses to die, refuses to decay entering a geological time-scale.

In this context, we can think about data that moves between the material and the digital and ask when and how data becomes waste. If surveillance today means to gather and possess all possible data which for the time being remains in a limbo of possible interest. We have an idea when and how data becomes a target. Is data that is left out of biased algorithmic filtering becoming waste? When does big data become obsolete if at all? 

Obsolete Sounds

Alongside various media becoming obsolete, specific sounds tied to these media are vanishing too. The noise that surrounds us is saturated by sounds emanating from various technology. Our sonic environment changes based on the technology that co-creates it. Here are some sites that archive some of the most prominent sounds from the near past such as the cracking of the apple ipod wheel or the 56K dial-up modem sound.

http://savethesounds.info/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p06mrwzr

https://www.stuff.tv/features/15-forgotten-tech-sounds-you-just-dont-hear-any-more